Dr. Charlotte W. Lewis Director/Analyst

Charlotte has had a life long connection with the earth and with animals.  During her graduate school training she was introduced to the concepts and practises of Taoist thought, Jungian psychology and ecopsychology, which along with mystical Christianity inform her life and practise. The creation and vision of Living Systems has been for her another vehicle of service to family, community and the earth.  Charlotte practises as a spiritual psychologist in San Francisco having received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies. Charlotte is also a graduate of  UCLA where she received her B.S. in Psychobiology and Neurophysiology. She is also currently a half time core faculty member at ITP (Institute of Tranpersonal Psychology) in Palo Alto, California. As Director and Analyst with LSLM, Charlotte is engaged in the construction and implementation of community based ecological models for resource management, within the greater California megaregion. She serves as one of our marketing and educational outreach persons and takes great pleasure in seeing the delight and healing the animals bring to the communities we serve. "The practise of spritual psychology and holistic land management create a great balance in my life.  I have the blessing of working to bring balance and wholeness to both the inner and the outer worlds."

Jared A. Lewis

Resource Manager

Jared Lewis holds a B. A. from Bennington College in Bennington VT. Jared also attended Cal Poly SLO where he studied Resource Management and Animal Science. In 1995-97 Jared interned at the Swanton Pacific Ranch  in Davenport ,California. Jared has interned on the 45 Ranch in Ione, California, Windsong Ranch in Cayucous, California. Prior to his work with LSLM Jared worked as a Grazier with a small Grazing firm in Central CA.

 Jared has been invited to present on the topic of Managed Grazing by numerous public groups and municipal agencies including: San Francisco Dept. of Environment, PAPA, Santa Cruz Parks Dept., Firesafe Marin and Friends of Sausal Creek. Additionally, Jared has been a consultant for Managed Grazing projects around the state, and has drafted  grazing plans for municipal and state agency clients---including a plan for Wilder Ranch State Park. Jared has attended and participated in numerous HRM trainings and field day, and holds a certificate in Firesafe Planning from the Firesafe Council.

“I am an artist at heart. I have studied and trained to be, an artist, and I continue to pursue my artistic inclinations outside of my vocational pre-occupations. LSLM began as a dream, and manifest like a work of art. LSLM is an expression of idealism that has been inculcated through experience, which has given me the opportunity to both experience the synergy and friction of life within our human system. Idealism is a valid expression, insofar as it represents something “true”. It also contains an inherent dualism, which is by all means its imperfection. I am an ‘idealist’, an idiosyncratic one at that. Through the work that we do, I am able to test the reality of my idealism, and refine those ideals so that they no longer are a subtext or a hyper- reality, but conform to something more viable and more real than I ever could imagine without the practice and application of ideas.”

Grazing For Fire Prevention Video

Jared and San Bruno Mountain Restoration

Audio Interview 2003  

Brian S. Kirbis

Resource Manager

Descended from a lineage of foresters and farmers, I have long maintained an interest in agroforestry and have spent a number of years involved in the study and practice of resource management.  After a number of years engaged in the study of Chinese natural science, then managing a mountain nursery and promoting native gardening in Big Bear Lake, California, I returned to school and received a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of California at Santa Cruz with a focus in Ecological Anthropology.  I began working for LSLM during the summer of 2005.

While not in the field tending herds for LSLM throughout the state of California, I spend my time in southwestern China conducting fieldwork on tea garden ecology, indigeneity, and development in Yunnan Province.  The transformation of ecological, cultural, and conceptual, or knowledge-based, landscapes is of primary interest to me, as is the interconnectedness and interdependence between them.  These processes extend across time and through space and my research is consequently informed as much by historical trajectories as by contemporary fieldwork, and by a comparative approach between my work in China and in the United States.

I also maintain a practice of tea as essential to my own cultivation and as a community-oriented, pedagogic practice - a social vehicle for the dissemination of my research.  Beyond consumption practice, or material expression of the environments from which it is sourced, tea serves as a conceptual vehicle for engaging in discourses of ecology; ethnicity; indigenous/scientific knowledge; market exchange; hygiene; spiritual practice.  Thus, it aptly demonstrates the way in which Nature, as global discourse, can extend itself into a multiplicity of realms, serving as a paradigm through which to construct a comprehensive epistemology.  However, let us not forget about nature with a small 'n', lest we subvert the immanence of lived experience and the fragrance rising from the cup.