To My Now and Future Friends:
It has been a tough couple of years. The world economy has receded like low tide on a full moon. As financing for greenfield developments vanished so did Canopy Developments’ ability to start new projects. Compounding our challenges, I suffered a catastrophic physical injury in February of 2008. While pruning a tree branch on my property, I fell and severed my spinal cord at thoracic five. All signs pointed to the end of what promised to be a tremendously successful and innovative approach to land development and a company that sought a balance between the need of humans to explore and experience new places and the natural world’s struggle to thrive in parallel with human activity.
From the time it was founded in 2003 to present, Canopy has produced more than 40 major masterplans in 10 countries. We have worked on a range of major projects; in Costa Rica, Arizona and Kauai for Steve Case and his organization Revolution, for ski areas in Maine and exotic destinations like Jamaica, Belize, Panama, and Anguilla. Through this process the Canopy team of professionals has developed a unique set of proficiencies that we believe are rare and needed. We have also developed a set of guiding principles that have drawn us to certain projects and people and steered us away from others. We believe that a balance can be found, at minimum on the scale of a specific property and ecosystem, between humans and nature, and that if good work can be done on a small scale, there is hope to bring about large scale change in the way humans relate to their natural environment.
With this in mind, and with dramatic improvements in my health and strength since the accident, we have decided to “re-launch” Canopy. With this re-birth of the company we bring a smaller, leaner management team and a more refined focus on helping land owners, developers and investors re-think how they approach conservation and land development. We help develop an ethic around a piece of land and then build a team that can support and defend that ethic with good design, smart infrastructure, effective conservation tools and the right kind of capital partners that will see a project through to successful completion. We are not developers in the traditional sense of the word nor are we a design shop, but rather a facilitator that brings innovative ideas, best practices and the best professionals together to support a specific approach to development that honors the land, local communities and other stakeholders (including land owner, capital, and customer). We are certain that the result is a unique and superior process to conserving, improving and developing land that will result in a better financial, environmental, and experiential outcome. I hope you will take the time to look through our web site. If you think we can help you through a development process, please let us know.
Warm regards,
Tom Horton
