Josh Robinson
Founder & Landscape Designer

Josh, a San Diego native, is a master ecological artisan and infuses Ecology Artisans with his wealth of regenerative design, installation experience, and creativity.

Josh is a father, gardener, farmer, teacher, and ecological instigator. He has over 14 years of experience in the field designing, installing, and teaching about creating ecological abundant gardens, home, farms, and businesses. Josh is recognized throughout the Southwestern US as a leader in water harvesting and permaculture. He holds a Master’s Degree in Ecological Landscape Design.

His work has received multiple awards as well as being featured in Toby Hemenway’s Gaia’s Garden and Art Ludwig’s Create an Oasis with Greywater. In addition to his work with Ecology Artisans, Josh is the Director and co-founder of the San Diego Sustainable Living Institute, a non-profit program of the 1to1 Movement, where he is training the next generation of sustainability experts. Josh enjoys spending time traveling, hiking, and planting trees with his family.

Christopher Marciello
Founder, Landscape Designer, Arborist & Agroforester

Christopher is an International Society of Arboriculture certified Arborist and has been a student of Permaculture and regenerative design since 1995, having been introduced to Permaculture theory while studying desert ecology and plant identification in Nevada, and simultaneously undertaking the task of drylands farming sustainably in the Mojave Desert.

Working with a small group of fledgling Permaculture designers lead to experiments with water harvesting, integrated planting patterns and earthen building materials.

Christopher returned to the east coast in 1999 and began farming with Golden Rule Farm, at the Soule Homestead Education Center in Middleborough, Massachusetts to practice small scale organic farming. 

After completing a Permaculture design course with San Diego Sustainable Living Institute in 2013, Christopher began working professionally as a Permaculture Designer creating the design firm C2 Agriculture.

As a Permaculture designer, Christopher has installed and managed multiple food forests, as well as regenerative water harvesting landscapes, residential graywater systems and cistern based rainwater harvesting systems.

Christopher has been actively designing and managing agroforestry systems utilizing alley cropping, hedgerows, windbreaks and timberbelts, forest farming and cover cropping with animal grazing to develop soil fertility.

In service of professional development and the necessity to advance the science of Regenerative agriculture, he is currently completing an A.S. In Horticulture at Mira Costa College.

He is the designer and chief forester of Trees and Bees Regenerative Farm in Valley Center, CA., an Agroforestry farm.

Emmanuel Olivares
Landscape Foreman

Born and raised in Villa Nicolas Bravo in Guerrero, México with six siblings, Emmanuel is a humble, hard working and detail oriented person.
Emmanuel’s early years involved harvesting corn, beans, pumpkins and other farm items with his grandparents and uncles. He was also tasked with firewood collection using his axe and machete. Growing up, he began working on construction jobs with his father who taught him a “little bit of everything,” which helped serve him when he migrated to the United States with his father over ten years ago.

Since arriving in the US and obtaining his Green Card, Emmanuel has worked his way up through the ranks of landscape technicians and shows for it. He consistently noodles on irrigation challenges until the most elegant and simple solution shows up. Detail oriented, skilled in most everything, and humble and caring, Emmanuel is another wonderful addition to the Ecology Artisans team.

Lindsay Gucker
Landscape Technician

Lindsay is passionate about all things plant related. She holds a bachelors degree in Horticulture from Oregon State University as well as a Permaculture Design Certificate.

She found her enthusiasm for working with the land and cultivating plants while working on a remote Permaculture farm in Ecuador. She further honed her skills through seven seasons of organic vegetable production, providing fresh produce to her communities in New York, Connecticut and Colorado. Lindsay’s love of the connection between plants and people led her to conduct integrated pest management research in Tanzania and eventually settle in Southern California, where she found her place at Ecology Artisans. She is dedicated to upholding a supreme level of care in all of her work to create the most productive and beautiful landscapes San Diego has to offer. In her free time Lindsay can be found teaching and practicing yoga, gardening, cooking or exploring and recreating outdoors.

Chris Brickett
Landscape Technician

Born in New York City and living most of his life in Virginia, Chris got to know the salt marshes and forests of the east coast well.
After serving six years in the Army National Guard, he went on an adventure to explore California. Along the journey he found an article about permaculture, igniting a fire of passion and curiosity in him. Taking a permaculture design course in Indiana with Peter Bane and other great teachers in 2013 watered Chris’s seed of determination to change the way he lives and heal our relationship with nature.

Around the same time he was on a spiritual journey, visiting Buddhist monasteries in California, including the San Francisco Zen Center and Deer Park Monastery. He spent more than a year living at Deer Park, practicing mindfulness with a large community and aspiring to be a monk. This experience helped him see the value of all creatures we share the Earth with and taught him a great deal about living in community.

Thanks to the kindness and support of many friends and family, he is now living in San Diego pursuing his dream of a permaculture career. He has worked with great teachers like Alden Hough from Sky Mountain Permaculture and Brook Sarson with H2OME, installing rainwater tanks, greywater systems, earthworks, native landscapes and fruit trees. In October 2016 he completed the Water Harvesting Certification course in Tucson, Arizona with the Watershed Management Group and Brad Lancaster.

Today Chris is happily married to his wife Soco. They’re living simply in a tiny cottage with their little Chihuahua, and building new careers with the intention of helping people and the planet. Chris’s passions include compost and composting toilets, riding bicycles, tasting new wild edible plants, and daydreaming about helping others to consume less and generate more resources. To continue learning valuable skills, he will be attending the Ecological Landscaper Immersion and Farm School course taught by Permaculture Skills Center in Sebastopol, California.