STEVE McGUIRK

GENERAL OVERVIEW

Steve McGuirk has had a lifetime of working with the earth. As a child he gardened with his grandmother, an event that launched him on a pathway of education and practice exploring the breadth and depth of land and environment. In his young adult years, Steve was an aerial photographic technician in the United States Marine Corps, and went on to earn a Bachelor's degree in Landscape Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1975.

Out of this In this lifetime of experience, these are the areas of interest and expertise that Steve has been involved with:

• Habitat restoration
• Landscape architecture: residential, commercial, multi-family
• Open pit mining environmental mitigation
• Manure management
• Tuscan varietal olive oil orchards
• Erosion and sediment control (nationally Certified Professional in Erosion and Sediment Control – CPESC #677)
• Landscape construction
• Landscape maintenance
• Arboriculture
• Nurseries, both wholesale and retail
• Forest management practices
• Specification writing
• Homeowner's associations
• School gardens
• Site engineering
• Irrigation system design and installation
• Rice and alfalfa farming

In 2007, having already become certified as a construction mediator and arbitrator, Steve applied to the Straus Institute of Dispute Resolution, School of Law, at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. As a student there he performed nearly one hundred mediations in both the Small Claims and Limited Jurisdiction departments of Los Angeles Superior Court. He graduated with a Master's in Dispute Resolution (MDR) in 2009.