Russ Cohen grew up in the woods in the western suburbs of Boston and has had a lifelong interest in land conservation. He put together the first-ever Directory and Guide to Land Conservation Organizations active in Massachusetts in 1980, and was a keynote speaker at the first-ever Massachusetts Land Trust Conference in the early 1980s. He was also present at the gestation and birth of the Land Trust Exchange (now the Land Trust Alliance) over four decades ago, and served as one of its first employees. Russ served as the Executive Director of The Hillside Trust, the land trust serving metropolitan Cincinnati, from 1982 to 1986. More recently, Russ served as the Rivers Advocate for the Mass. Department of Fish and Game’s Division of Ecological Restoration from 1988 until his retirement in 2015.
