At Princeton he majored in English, and his senior thesis was titled “John Steinbeck: Proletarian Prophet.” He graduated with election to Phi Beta Kappa and was a member of Tower Club. He was literary editor of The Daily Princetonian his senior year.
After a Fulbright scholarship took him to Paris and Algiers for a year, Ans served with the Army in Germany. He then went to Harvard Law School.
He spent a year clerking for the chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court before spending 13 years as an associate and then a partner of a Boston law firm. Declining to be part of a merged firm, he opened his own office with a younger associate.
Ans became increasingly involved in conservation issues and founded the Truro Conservation Trust in 1981, serving as its chair for many years.
In 1986 he brought together a number of conservation organizations in the area and was instrumental in forming the Compact of Cape Cod Conservation Trusts, which is now “the oldest self-sustaining regional network of land trusts in the United States” and has helped preserve more than 8,000 acres of fragile environments on Cape Cod.
Ans died Jan. 27, 2017, in Truro, Mass. He is survived by his wife, Anne Kenney; his three children; and five grandchildren.