NOFA/Massachusetts 2006 Winter Conference
Annual Meeting

Saturday, January 21st, 2006
Bancroft School in Worcester, MA

BRIAN DONAHUE BIOGRAPHY

Brian Donahue is Associate Professor of American Environmental Studies on the Jack Meyerhoff Fund at Brandeis University, and Environmental Historian at Harvard Forest. He teaches courses on environmental issues, environmental history, and sustainable farming and forestry. He holds a BA, MA, and PhD from the Brandeis program in the History of American Civilization. He co-founded and for 12 years directed Land’s Sake, a non-profit community farm in Weston, Massachusetts. For three years he was Director of Education at The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. He is the author of Reclaiming the Commons: Community Farms and Forests in a New England Town (Yale University Press, 1999), and The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (Yale Press, 2004). His primary research interests include the history and the prospects of human engagement with the land. He aspires to be a yeoman and a scholar. He remains an active farmer in Weston, where he serves on several town boards and organizations devoted to land protection.

Brian grew up in Pennsylvannia “on the cutting edge of suburbia” (1) and spent much of his youth roaming the woods and fields around his house. There was very little active agriculture left in the region and, as an adult, Brian discovered he was an “agrarian orphan” (2). During his high school years, he developed a “radical environmentalist philosophy” (3) and founded an ecology action group to help combat local environmental problems. After graduation, his leisure time took him to wilderness areas, hiking and camping. This was where he envisioned his future. “It was a Thoreauvian ideal: to live simply on a small patch of cultivated land, practically invisible, with undisturbed wilderness at my back” (4)

It was on one such trip, hiking in the Colorado Rockies, that Brian had a life altering experience, an inexplicable acute depression. In the midst of the wilderness he loved, he felt totally unsatisfied. According to Brian “I was walking in a magnificent world of unspoiled nature, but I had no meaningful connection to it.” He realized that was his problem. Retreating to an evershrinking wilderness was an inadequate response to environmental degradation. The revelation that he had that day was that “What we needed was to protect the places where we lived…we needed to form close connections with nature…where we grew our food, heated our houses, took our daily pleasures…Truly protected wilderness will follow from a society that has at last worked out a healthy relation with its everyday landscape, with its productive forests and farmlands.” (8)

From that realization lay Brian’s path to the suburb of Weston and subsequent work on the community farms of Green Power and Land’s Sake where he and his colleagues strived to engage the community in active farming and forestry whereby the land would “benefit from our presence, rather than need to be protected from us.” (46)

¹Brian Donahue. June, 2005
²Yale University Press. Yale Author Experts—Brian Donahue. http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/experts/expertdonahue.html
³Donahue, Brian. Reclaiming the Commons: Community Farms and Forests in a New England Town. Yale University Press, New Haven. 1999

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