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Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient Roger Peterson
ROGER TORY PETERSON
Awarded by
President Jimmy Carter
June 9, 1980
Roger Tory Peterson has achieved distinction as a consummate painter, writer, teacher and scientist. As an unabashed lover of birds and a distinguished ornithologist, he has furthered the study, appreciation and protection of birds the world over. And he has done more. He has impassioned thousands of Americans, and has awakened in millions across this land, a fondness for nature's other two-legged creatures.
Who was Roger Tory Peterson?
Naturalist, artist, educator, photographer - Roger Tory Peterson's biography is testimony to how inadequate simple labels are in describing the life and work of a man who transcended categories and boundaries throughout his long career. He was active in numerous fields. Above all, he was the single individual who did more than any other American of this century to kindle in the public a widespread interest and concern for the natural world.
Born in Jamestown to working-class immigrant parents, Roger was a self-made man who made a successful livelihood by single-mindedly following his guiding passion for birds. In books, articles, lectures, films, and above all in his revolutionary field guides, he showed countless readers and listeners how to see and observe nature. His impact lives on in the modern-day proliferation of field guides, nature books, and nature education programs. It lives on in the popularity of bird watching as a recreational pastime. It lives on, too, in the environmental-protection laws that stem in part from his advocacy and education work. For Roger, passion, joy, and commitment all flowed from the same source, from the world of wings he first discovered in the woods and fields of Jamestown.
Roger well knew the value of education - he always remembered how his seventh-grade teacher, Blanche Hornbeck, helped introduce him to the wider world of nature through the Junior Audubon Club she founded. As an adult, Roger lectured ceaselessly for the National Audubon Society and other organizations, produced educational pamphlets that reached millions of schoolchildren, and wrote articles and books that inspired uncounted readers. But his greatest contribution to a more widespread public understanding of the natural world lies in his development of practical, user-friendly guidebooks. His A Field Guide to the Birds, published in 1934, introduced simple, reliable identification techniques that can be used by anyone.
That first, wildly successful guide led to others. Roger wrote and illustrated some, and edited many more. The Peterson Field Guide Series now numbers over fifty titles that describe practically all readily observable facets of nature, from fishes to mushrooms to clouds and the stars above. "In this century," wrote the ecologist Paul Ehrlich, "no one has done more to promote an interest in living creatures than Roger Tory Peterson, the inventor of the modern field guide."
The Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History is a national, non-profit nature education organization with headquarters in Jamestown, New York, birthplace of world renowned artist and naturalist, Roger Tory Peterson (1908-1996).
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Medal History
