Smith Club of San Francisco
and Marin
Alumnae Profiles
Dane Nichols '68
Spring 2002
Profile by Sarah Cross Mills '66
Part I
“Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.”
Living at Smith when Beatles music streamed out of dorm windows all across campus, it’s no surprise that one of Dane Nichols’ favorite quotations comes from John Lennon. At mid-life, Dane chooses this characteristically ironic way of summarizing the often spontaneous, colorful and adventuresome events of her career. The very word “career” is probably not one Dane would use in talking about her past thirty years, but she certainly has made a career of seizing opportunities, creating fulfilling work, and contributing to people and the environment.
Dane’s passion for preserving the environment is largely responsible for her moving to San Francisco in 2000. She's in her third year as Chair of the Board of Directors of The Natural Step US, part of an international network of non-profit scientific and educational organizations working with corporations and communities to accelerate the movement toward a sustainable society.
The Natural Step US, housed in The Presidio’s Thoreau Center for Sustainability, was first chaired by Paul Hawken, who brought the organization to this country in 1995 after learning of its many successes in Sweden. Hawken is well known for his involvement in businesses recognized for their environmental focus and for his popular books, Growing a Business and Natural Capitalism.
Since joining Hawken and the steering committee that brought The Natural Step to the United States, Dane has advised and supported the organization in various significant ways. Her work has provided the direction she was seeking and the satisfaction of a constant desire for meaning in her life.
Executive Director Catherine Gray praises Dane’s dedication, generosity and wisdom and attributes the organization’s current success in large part to Dane’s inspired and fun-filled leadership style.
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Part II - Living and Chronicling Adventures Overseas
After graduating from Smith with a History degree, Dane entered the world of journalism at Newsweek magazine. Using a reporter’s instincts, she recorded in-the-moment experiences of living through turbulence in Brazil, Cuba and Paraguay. In the 1989 military coup that overthrew Stroessner’s regime, Marines protected the American Embassy where Dane’s family resided, while Paraguayan factions occupying buildings on either side exchanged gunfire overhead.
As the mother of two babies in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the family’s first foreign post, Dane was always on the alert, unused to armed guards and terrorist threats. Speaking Portuguese, her newly acquired language, helped her make friends and adjust to her role as wife of the U.S. Consul. Middle-of-the-night evacuations from Cuba to Miami occurred twice for the family in 1979-80.
The assignment ended prematurely when the Cuban government’s anti-American posture intensified.
Dane’s journals from these times are full of colorful details of events happening around her family, witnesses to history in the making. In each new setting, Dane’s priority was always the safety and happiness of her children. Today, as adults, her son and daughter talk of their time abroad as the best of their growing-up years.
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Part III - Getting Into the Action Abroad
The wife of a career foreign service officer for twenty years, Dane met the challenges of officially being called a “dependent spouse” by focusing on the well-being of her two children while living in foreign countries and by staying open to creative opportunities that reflected her values and interests. In the last of four such posts abroad, when her then-husband was Ambassador to Paraguay from 1988 to 1991, Dane discovered her deep connection to international environmental issues, as well as the important influence she could wield as a diplomat’s wife.
Shortly after arriving, she was invited by visitors from The Nature Conservancy to join them on a trip into the Paraguayan rainforest. She knew immediately that she wanted to support efforts to conserve this land. The longest-surviving dictator in South America, Alfredo Stroessner, was still ruling Paraguay, having essentially turned it into a refuge for Nazi war criminals in the 1950s.
Taking a potential political risk, Dane put her considerable energy behind The Nature Conservancy’s plan to purchase the largest remaining sub-tropical Atlantic rainforest in South America. The Mbaracayu Reserve is now forever protected as a United Nations Bio-Reserve. Still a board member of Fundacion Mbaracayu, Dane helps direct policy for one of the world’s great rainforest preserves.
Dane’s sparkling, creative enthusiasm burst out when she talks about her family’s four years in Brussels. The European culture and the role of women in society were more like those in the States than what she experienced in Latin countries, and she already spoke fluent French, having studied it throughout secondary school and college. Her children were five and four years old when they moved to Belgium from Brazil, and Dane appreciated the more secure environment for her family and her own personal freedom in this beautiful old city.
Big ideas inspire her the most, and she’s always been confident in her ability to take risks, to initiate creative projects and motivate others to get involved in them. So when she heard about a young Belgian woman who wanted to create a children’s museum, she jumped in with both feet and hands. Like a sparkplug to an engine, Dane fired up a working team. She and two Belgian friends did it all – they designed, and built, and painted, and guided children through exhibits in Le Musee des Enfants. The first such museum in Europe, it’s now 25 years old and has been copied by many other countries. Today, she draws ongoing joy from knowing that something she helped bring into existence continues to thrive.
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Part IV - The Good Works and Adventures Continue
Fun-loving and naturally drawn to people, Dane found equally enjoyable work in Washington, DC, between foreign assignments. She organized international conferences and helped a catering firm produce events for President Reagan and for Prince Charles and Princess Diana.
Volunteering to raise funds at her child’s school, she co-founded a hugely successful annual awards ceremony that recognizes learning disabled stars in the performing arts. She also brought together French and American historians and film makers and groups of former U.S. war correspondents, senators and congressmen to promote the building of a multi-media World War II museum, Le Memorial, in Normandy.
In addition to her current contributions as board member with The Natural Step and several other environmental organizations, Dane is in the Founders’ Circle of Rachel’s Network (named for Rachel Carson), a new partnership of women promoting women as leaders and change-agents dedicated to stewardship of the earth. Proportionate to gender, women give more money to environmental causes than men, and yet, women are still underrepresented on boards and in leadership roles in environmental organizations. In supporting thhis network, Dane is excited by the possibility, similar to that of The Natural Step, of designing new ways out of critical problems.
This February, Dane visited Cuba, having left so suddenly 22 years ago. With a journalist’s incisiveness, she describes the many ironies of Cuban life today, all part of the mixture of Revolution, Soviet domination and U.S. embargo. Did the trip provide closure to a previous time in life, or has it opened the door to another opportunity? Ever true to her past, Dane holds the tension between accepting what is and entertaining with enthusiasm a vision of what could be.
Undoubtedly, there are adventures to fill chapters yet to be written.
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