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COVER STORIES: BACK TO THE LAND...STILL
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Nina Danforth, J73
A new chapter in a lifelong commitment to stewardship
and land preservation
Back to Back
to the Land...Still
Nina Danforth, J73, has happy memories of her grandparents’ dairy farm
in Weston, Massachusetts. But those memories are also edged with sadness. She
and her family watched helplessly as the farm was cut in two by eminent domain
takings for the Massachusetts Turnpike and later for the new MetroWest water
supply tank.
Those losses have shaped a lifelong career committed to environmental stewardship,
most recently with the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation.
Today, Danforth, who was known as Nina Gomez-Ibanez while at Tufts, is an educator
and organizer at a community farm and forestry operation in Weston, still her
hometown. Nonprofit Land’s Sake combines ecologically sound management
of public lands with hands-on environmental education. Outreach activities include
a summer youth program, maple syrup making, and a farm stand that’s popular
for its fresh, organically grown fruits and vegetables.
Danforth is busy expanding the organization’s education initiatives such
as the Maple Sugar Project. On a recent sunny winter day, she led a kindergarten
group to a sugar maple tree near their school and showed the children how to
tap for sap. There were squeals of delight as Danforth encouraged them to catch
the drips on their fingertips. She is heartened by such outdoor experiences: “This
is the most direct, sensory kind of learning we have available to us, and it
fosters a growing respect for trees and all living things. I believe schools
will be seeking it increasingly as communities grow more crowded.”
In many ways, Danforth sees her kinship with the soil as a personal responsibility.
While at Tufts, disturbed by the “endless paving” she saw on her
commute from Charlestown, she won a grant to transform an abandoned two-acre
lot in Sullivan Square into a community garden. Nearly 30 years later, this award-winning
site continues to be managed by the nonprofit she founded, Gardens for Charlestown,
Inc. “I discovered I could share with my city neighbors the joys of hoeing
and growing our own fresh food, and that led to securing the land for one of
Boston’s first permanent community-garden spaces.”
Land’s Sake, she says, demonstrates novel approaches to managing public
green space, and such inventive ideas have never been more urgent. “I have
a day-to-day awareness of the land because of my growing up on a farm near Boston,
surrounded by urbanizing influences,” she says. “When you grow up
on a farm split by a highway, it just becomes part of your being—the frailty
of productive, well-tended land—that it’s dwindling, misused, and
undervalued. A grazed meadow: you don’t see that in the area anymore, or
a field cut for hay. That’s a precious thing.”
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