Board of Directors

Susan Jane Brown
Staff Attorney, Western Environmental Law Center, Portland, OR
Susan Jane is a renowned environmental attorney. She has served as Congressman Peter DeFazio's Natural Resources Counsel, as a Professor and Staff Attorney for the Pacific Environmental Advocacy Center at the Lewis and Clark School of Law, and as Executive Director of the Gifford Pinchot Task Force. Susan Jane is credited with stopping old-growth logging in the Southern Washington Cascades and has also served as the lead attorney on several of KS Wild’s successful litigation efforts.

Shannon is a botanist, naturalist and educator who has lived in the Klamath-Siskiyous for seven years and served on the KS Wild Board of Directors for four years. Her graduate work at Southern Oregon University involved a botanical inventory and conservation project in the threatened Condrey Mountain Roadless Area on the Siskiyou Crest, which contributed to advocacy work being done by KS Wild.

Liz Crosson
Associate Attorney, Lawyers for Clean Water, Inc., Santa Monica, CA
In addition to being a naturalist, avid birder, and Klamath-Siskiyou enthusiast, Liz is an Associate Attorney with Lawyers for Clean Water, Inc. in Santa Monica, CA. She works on litigation aimed to eliminate pollution and prevent degradation of California's aquatic and coastal ecosystems. Liz gained environmental advocacy experience working for several non-profits in Oregon and California, including KS Wild. Liz has an undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley and a J.D. from Lewis and Clark Law School.

Shelley Elkovich, Board President
Research Assistant, OSU Extension Small Farms Program, Community activist, Ashland, OR
Shelley, her partner and their two children have made Ashland their home since 2000. The Klamath Siskiyous are the family's unschooling "classroom," and they enjoy birding and backpacking. Shelley is an organic gardener, sometime writer and avid crafter. She is an active community member who enjoys including her kids in creative, grass-roots organizing that models justice, compassion, and a love of wild places. Locally, she has been instrumental in forest protection campaigns, starting a new community garden, stopping the Mt. Ashland Ski Expansion, and ACLU litigation defending free speech.   Her current paid work projects include researching and preparing courses on a variety of agronomic and farm management topics and participating in the design of a new farm incubator program for new and limited resource farmers and farm workers.

Chuck Burr

Farmer, teacher, author of Culturequake: The Restoration Revolution and founder of the Southern Oregon Permaculture Institute (SOPI) and Restoration Farm in Ashland, OR

Chuck serves on nonprofit boards, was a software CEO, interned for President Reagan and has an MBA in finance and a BA in Accounting. He has been a traveler, mountaineer, rock and ice climber. As a board member of the Sheep Mountain Alliance, Chuck was part of the original team help raise $50 million in a public private partnership and preserve Telluride, Colorado's 460 acre valley floor as open space.

Joseph Flaherty
Elementary school teacher, O'Brien, OR
An avid snowboarder, Joseph Flaherty got involved in the work of KS Wild in 2000 in support of the campaign to protect the Mount Ashland watershed.  He also spent part of a summer sitting in an old Douglas Fir hoping to stop the Peak Timber Sale in the upper Rogue basin. Joseph worked for KS Wild for a while as a door-to-door canvasser raising awareness of local forest issues.  While a college student at Southern Oregon University, he edited and published the campus paper the Soapbox.  Recently, he moved to the Illinois Valley where he works as a primary school teacher.  He continues to ride his snowboard, but now he has to hike for his turns in the wild western Siskiyou.