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Ben Diebold: A Legacy of Preservation

Ben Diebold is the current president of the Madison Land Conservation Trust, and his eclectic background in computers, archeology, and art, actually helped develop the skills needed to navigate what can sometimes be a complex responsibility. His love of history, people, and Madison all contributed to his decision to serve the land trust. In his last term as president, Ben says he is honored to have been a part of carrying the legacy of preservation forward for his hometown.

Ben started his journey in Alabama and moved with his family to Maine, where he spent his formative years attending high school and college in the Pine Tree State. After graduation, Ben started out in the tech world in the 1990s as part of the wave of coders and programmers in Silicon Valley in California.

“I stayed in Maine all the way through high school and college, and I was actually a classics major,” Ben says. “I got interested in these computers, and this was around the time that Macintosh was coming out, so I was kind of self-taught on Mac. I ended up going to California as an intern…as their technical support guy. I spent a year as an intern, and at the end of that, I decided to stay in California and got a job with Apple essentially. I worked for a software subsidiary of Apple. I started out with them as tech support and then became part of the quality assurance team.”

But Ben, despite his aptitude for tech, started to think about other employment options, and he switched his career choice.

“Back then, Apple would give a sabbatical to its employees who had been there five years. You could take three months of paid leave and just go do something interesting and reassess your future with the company or pursue your life’s interests,” Ben says.

And Ben certainly did some reassessing. His time off led to a decision to apply for graduate school in archeology, and, despite a tech background, he was chosen as the only archeology student in the Yale program the year he applied, and his new career as an archeologist began.

“I decided at that time to quit the tech world and get into archeology. I applied to something like eight schools and was accepted at Yale. I enrolled in the Ph.D. program in the anthropology department and pursued near-eastern archeology, and I worked in Turkey and Syria. It was a small department and I was the only one chosen for that department that year,” Ben recalls.

Ben says his interest in archeology and history has always been a deep-rooted passion.

“I have always loved history and just been fascinated thinking about how people live and where they used to live. I was just drawn to it. These origin stories, for some reason, were always kind of fun for me. In some ways, that’s kind of how I got involved in the land trust,” Ben says.

Ben jokes that his degree in archaeology is ABD, as in “All But Dissertation,” meaning he never completed his degree. Still, his years as an active archeologist doing field work were an incredible life experience, according to Ben.

Ben worked sites in both Syria and Turkey, and during his time in the region, the Hafez el-Assad dictatorship was in full swing, which meant a constant “police” presence, despite having been invited into the country.

“I spent three field seasons in northern Syria and then four or five field seasons in Turkey,” Ben says. “It was an incredible experience.”

According to Ben, despite the constant watchful eyes of the country’s secret police, he found the people of Syria always ready to embrace the Middle Eastern culture of hospitality and kindness to strangers.

“Well, this was the ‘90s, so the dictator [Hafez] Assad was in charge. So, it was kind of a very closed country, but they were trying to encourage some sort of American involvement, so they invited my advisor to do this project over there. We actually were given support by the government. For the most part, they left us alone, but we were certainly followed and had our hotel rooms called at night, but the Syrian people could not have been nicer,” says Ben. “We were doing a regional survey component as part of the project, so we would walk the landscape for sites not yet documented. So, we would bump into people in the countryside, and they just could not have been more hospitable. They would invite us into their homes, make us tea, share what little food they had with us. The sense of generosity and hospitality of those people is something I will never forget. Some of these people were desperately poor but still just generous and warm. I loved Syria. It’s very sad to think about what has happened since the civil war and now this earthquake.”

After his travels, Ben once again decided to alter his profession, and he eventually landed a job at Yale, married, and moved to Madison in 2009.

“I married my wife, Christine, got a great job at the art gallery at Yale and worked first at the Peabody, then the library, and I’ve now worked at the art gallery for 12 years,” says Ben. “The gallery is a unique place; it’s free and open to the public, and I’ve really enjoyed working there and have had such a great experience there.”

Ben says he works mainly with Indo-Pacific art and Indonesian artwork as the senior museum assistant.

“Basically, I’m the support person for the department. For the most part I’m cataloging shadow puppets. We have the world’s largest collection of Indonesian shadow puppets, and I spend a lot of time working on these puppets. We have like 22,000 puppets, it’s really huge. It can be overwhelming sometimes, but it’s actually a really fun job.”

All of these varied interests may not seem like a path leading to working with a land trust, but Ben says his skill set informs his passion for preservation and for the complexities of leading an entity that files grants and navigates governmental regulations. Mostly, though, Ben says it was a rambunctious family dog that led him to his involvement with the land trust.

“Well, when we moved to Madison, we had a dog, and it was so full of energy. He was a rescue dog, and he had so much energy that I was just looking for any way possible just to tire him out. I was taking him out to the woods of North Madison and was just running around with him, and I kept bumping into these interesting historic features, old stone walls, cellar holes, and old settlements in North Madison. I’m obviously interested in old stuff, so I started doing some research and reading,” says Ben. “There is actually a lot of cool stuff up there and I contacted the land trust…and they invited me to join in some trail clearing projects, and ended up inviting me to join the trust more actively. I was on the board for several years and then eventually became president. And it all started just by trying to tire out my dog.”

Ben says that his involvement has been a great fit for his skills. He says that dealing with the logistics and paperwork is his job; otherwise, he tries to stay out of the way and let others utilize their strengths.

“There are such great people at the trust. I really enjoy working with all the volunteers and the board of directors. They are an extremely talented group of people doing such useful things for the community, says Ben.

According to Ben, the nonpartisan nature of working with the trust also helped solidify his belief in the importance of what organizations, like the Madison Land Conservation Trust, do for their communities.

“We try really had to have a nonpartisan, nonpolitical eye. I mean, we do once in a while wander into regulatory disputes, but our bylaws are written to be nonpartisan, and we have a lot of different kinds of people, but all of us share the same vision of preservation,” says Ben. “We have so many great people at the trust working on these issues. The land trust has a lot of great management experience and is very well run. And that has nothing to do with me. I have always been grateful for the skill and dedication of everyone involved there. What I’ve been pleased with is that we have a very strong record of land acquisition these last number of years, and that has very little to do with me. That has little to do with me, and everything to do with all of the talented people working behind the scenes.”

For more information on the Madison Land Conservation Trust, visit madisonlandtrust.org.