Interview with David Culberson

By Howard Lovy

Introduction

The Interview

LOVY: Development issues, especially in today’s polarized political climate, are often framed as a choice between nature and human habitation. Does it have to be a choice? Can we have both?

CULBERSON: One could argue that the conventional application of preservation removes humanity from nature. We put fences around a forest and call it preservation, while it is still being heavily impacted by the surrounding community. We can read books on the subject and feel good, or visit natural protected areas for a few hours, and governments can offer broad policies that help protect the environment. But we cannot teach and we cannot learn about the importance of our natural surroundings unless we personalize the experience.With thoughtful design and building practices firmly in place, one can touch, smell, taste, and live with nature in a way that both benefit. This experience teaches respect and, as environmental understanding continues to grow through co-habilitation, there will be less need for conventional preservation.Not all places can or should be inhabited. Others are filled to the brim with human habitation and little can be done to bring nature back. The areas in between are most important. Humans can easily preserve and share these natural environments, but need first to learn to truly respect them.

LOVY: Your book Alterio’s Motive manages to include some great elements of a crime thriller — a drug cartel, human trafficking — while also incorporating your other passion, sustainable development. How do you balance your two instincts as a writer and developer?

CULBERSON: My day job is that of a developer; albeit a tree-hugging developer, which frequently takes me to Third World and remote environments, places that provide rich fodder for writers. Consequently, the characters, places, and events I use in my novels are often based on real life experiences. A good memory and a generous sense of humor make writing about these things fairly easy.

LOVY: Tell our readers more about the real-life setting of your book, the Yucatán Peninsula, and some of the environmental problems it’s facing.

CULBERSON: There are many. Clearing-cutting of natural habitat is the most obvious. Bulldozers have cleared thousands of hectares of mangroves to make way for hotels but locals have cleared even more habitat in the past twenty years with machetes. Privatization of ejido land (communal land confiscated by the government during the revolution of the early 1900s) is the cause. The government offers the newly privatized and subdivided land to locals who have been living on it. The locals then slash and burn all vegetation on their lots to delineate ownership.As with so many places around the world, the destruction of the very thing that attracts tourists in the first place ruins the experience. Too often, what has been destroyed is replaced with artificial attractions that pave the way for mass tourism markets and further overdevelopment.

LOVY: Mexico, itself, with both its beauty and corruption, also seems to be a character in itself in your book. In the United States, we think of Mexico as both a paradise for vacationers and a place of great violence. Do we get a warped view of what Mexico is really like?

CULBERSON: Yes and no. Mexico has had a history of violence from the earliest cultures to the present and its physical diversity makes it a popular tourist destination. But how much can one really learn about a place during a weeklong vacation? How much can one really learn from a news snippet? Mexico is complex and one needs to take time to do more than scratch the surface to try to understand it.

LOVY: Tell us about your work as a sustainable developer, yourself. You describe your Brickyard Creek Community in Wisconsin as an “environmental residential community.” What does that mean and what is the philosophy behind the development?

CULBERSON: Brickyard Creek is all about preservation and respect for the natural environment in a way that allows people and nature to effortlessly coexist, both the better for it. Our owners and guests live within nature and are a step away from virgin habitat and wildlife at all times. When most urbanites see a bear close up in the wild, the experience will make their decade.

LOVY: Why are you using fiction to illustrate challenges associated with development? Why not write nonfiction? What is it about telling a story that appeals to you?

CULBERSON: I have wanted to write an academic book on sustainable development and still will. But how many people actually wonder how the resort they are staying in got there? How many care enough to pick up a textbook on the subject? I thought that a blueprint for sustainable development weaved into novel about drugs, greed, and violence might attract a reader who has never thought about sustainability, or what it means.

LOVY: Greed and profit motive are both elements in this story, as they are in real-life development issues. There is a perception that profits suffer the more sustainable you make a development. How do you undo that perception?

CULBERSON: More developers need to understand, design, and build sustainable projects. Developers are like lemmings—they’ll follow each other into the sea if they think there’s profit in it, and they build what they see other developers build, thinking that’s what the market wants. It’s a cart-and-horse thing. The market will buy into anything that offers a higher quality of life: less hurry and crowds, functional design for easy living, places that stay in touch with nature and a community that has a strong sense of place—all traits of sustainability. Developers are far too density driven, mistakenly thinking that more product produces more profit. More product creates more work and produces lower profit margins.

Think of Central Park. What would the values of surrounding and nearby homes and hotels be if the park wasn’t there? Think of an island. What would property values be if every foot of beach was developed? What would those values be if the developments were clustered, leaving vast stretches of empty beaches and creating exclusivity. People will travel further and pay more for that type of experience and developers will make more profit by building less product. Open space is the new luxury and people will pay for it.

LOVY: There are three major points of view in this book. Total development, sustainable development, and no development. Are these the major elements at play in real life? Are there times when one should win out over the other two?

CULBERSON: On one hand, there are many places that should never be developed for a variety of reasons. On the other hand, urban areas are heavily impacted because they need to provide housing for all residents, but there are a multitude of methods to sustainably develop and redevelop urban areas.I was recently part of a group speaking on preservation. The first speaker represented an NGO that raised funds to buy land to be placed in preservation and talked of the difficulties in finding sufficient funds. The second speaker was from the Nature Conservancy and talked about the difficulty of convincing land owners to place preservation easements on parts of their property to protect wildlife corridors. Neither provided enough preservation to prevent sprawl and overdevelopment.

I was last to speak and offered a different preservation strategy—make it profitable. Take an outstanding natural environment, study its characteristics, develop those areas that are less important to its sustainability and preserve the rest. You will find, in most cases, profitable projects can be built on 10 percent of the land.But it’s not just developers that need to understand this concept; it’s also academics, governments and policy makers, who typically look at development and zoning issues from 50,000 feet, truncating the issues and complicating the permitting process for sustainable projects.

LOVY: When did you first realize that you could be a sustainable developer? Was there a moment in your personal or professional life?

CULBERSON: My awareness came after my first large project when I realized I was building units I wouldn’t live in. This was the early 1980s and I was living in a home that was open to the trade winds, eliminating the need for AC; was built utilizing the existing topography, making construction less expensive and less impactful and was landscaped with the natural surrounding environment, eliminating the need for lawn mowers and fertilizers. I knew I needed to rethink my approach to development. What cemented my thoughts was pure economics. While I was developing condominiums and homes that cost $100,000 per unit to build and that were renting for $100 per night, a man came to the island, leased one of the best beaches in the world and built tents on wooden platforms. His cost per unit was about $6,000 and they rented for—$100 per night.

LOVY: How do you know so much about the world of Mexican drug cartels? Undercover research?

CULBERSON: I have no firsthand experience—that I’m aware of. Having lived and worked in Mexico for several years my cartel knowledge is anecdotal, sprinkled with academic research.

LOVY: What books would you like to take with you on a desert island?

CULBERSON: Survival manuals.

LOVY: Calumet Editions also recently acquired and released your first book, Back Time on Love City. It’s a kind of coming-of-age story loosely based on your life?

CULBERSON: Yes, it’s about my first few years on a Caribbean island, my formative adult years, and a modern-day pirate who took me under his wing and frequently tested me by fire.

It’s not about sustainable development, but all places evolve from primitive collective shelters to a pioneering stage, through various stages of development, to overdevelopment and, in some cases, implosion. The evolution of place may take hundreds or thousands of years or, in some cases, may take just a few decades. Sometime during its evolution, usually just before the over-development stage, a place is in its most special period.

Back Time on Love City is about an island in the Caribbean and takes the reader to special place, made special by events and a cast of characters living there at the time.

LOVY: Writing a book and planning a development: are they alike in any way?

CULBERSON: Planning a book and planning a development are similar. The development processes, though, are much different. An author can control the writing pace, characters and plot, and deliberate his or her decisions. A developer juggles multiple disciplines and problems arise at a fast pace. Informed, quick decisions are critical for success.

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