Jack Boulware

Late at night, lying in the bed of a tent cabin, the entire island of St. John comes alive. Waves regularly rinse the beach. Frogs call out to each other. And somewhere nearby, a spastic iguana slowly crunches through the forest, before suddenly falling off a branch. This isn’t $1000-a-bed resort citadel living. This is Maho Bay Campgrounds, where for 100 bucks you can spend a night in the world’s first eco-resort.

Open since 1976, Maho Bay sits on the north side of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands, surrounded on both sides by national park. Its 114 cabins spread unobtrusively among 14 acres, a nearly invisible complex of buildings joined by a labyrinth of wooden walkways. Years before eco-tourism was even a word, Maho was quietly redefining what it means to travel and leave a small footprint.

But all this may come to an end. In a few years the lease will run out on this visionary facility, and the landowners want to sell. Asking price – $32 million.

Maho Bay’s owner, 79-year-old Long Island developer Stanley Selengut, doesn’t have the money. There are basically two options to save the resort. Either a wealthy private investor buys the land and retains the campground, or the Trust for Public Land takes ownership, turns the property over to the park, and Maho Bay is hired as a concession.

Among loyal Maho Bay guests, the resort represents much more than a place to vacation. It’s a sort of extended family. Many guests have returned 15 or 20 times, often timing their trips to coincide with friends’.

The resulting atmosphere is much like an all-ages summer youth camp. Everyone buses their own dishes in the restaurant. Bathrooms are communal. Leftover supplies like food, books, and suntan lotion go to the Help Yourself Center, to be used by future guests. Everything imaginable is recycled, from light bulbs and beer bottles, to towels, bed linens and even dryer lint. Nightly entertainment can feature a marine biologist talk, music from local bands, glass-blowing, or stargazing. During the off-season, volunteers work six hours a day in exchange for free room and board. A large number of the island locals were once employees.

Maho attracts about 12,000 guests a year, many of them from states along the east coast. “We think the whole state of Vermont empties out during the winter,” laughs Maho marketing manager Melody Smith.

“It’s the least expensive place to bring a family to St. John,” she adds. “People don’t want to stay in a hotel that looks exactly like the rest of the chain in the United States or around the world.”

For all its reputation as a green destination, Selengut says his original vision had little to do with conservation. “I was going to build a little lodge right on the ocean, and a nice old couple would run it, they’ve have a little scuba boat and a little sailboat. My friends would visit, I would visit, and if it lost money who cares, because I could take my vacations as a tax deduction.”

Irate at the news that a New York builder had gotten ahold of commercially zoned property, the St. John park superintendent met with Selengut and informed him that development could easily disrupt topsoil, and ruin the beaches and coral reefs. Selengut agreed to instead construct a pedestrian community, running elevated walkways between the trees so as not to destroy anything.

“In those days, the way you developed is, you clearcut the land, you built what you wanted to build, and then you re-landscaped it with grass and palm trees,” Selengut says. He hired a few locals, and built a series of 18 tent cabins, inspired by structures he’d seen on a trip to Africa. All the buildings were erected on hand-dug footings, to minimize impact to the land.

From the beginning, Maho was conceived as affordable instead of elitist. “That was more of a challenge than the green part,” Selengut admits. “Being green, if you have endless supplies of money and wanted to charge $600 a night, it isn’t that hard. But being green and having it affordable doubles up the challenge.”

Not long after Maho opened, two things happened that completely changed the little campground. Neighboring resorts began sending their overbooked customers. And a writer for the New York Times came to visit and wrote an article that was reprinted around the U.S.

“We were full right off the bat,” Selengut remembers. “That gave me the feeling this wasn’t really a toy, but there was a real market for what is now called nature-based travel, or eco-tourism. So that gave me the encouragement to putting some real money into it, and making it into a real business.”

As the camp built more cabins, Selengut’s curiosity about his customers grew. From the beginning, he would send every guest a personal letter with a questionnaire, and a SASE back to his office in New York. Many of the resulting suggestions came from professionals like landscapers and botanists, and were directly incorporated into the Maho design plan. Other ideas were a little different.

“One guest was an artist that worked in fabric,” he says. “I came down, and here’s this worker taking our waste sheets and tie-dying them, and batiking them, and sewing them into stuff. Somebody else found out that a kiln can fire ceramics using pallet wood, so we’d go to the dump and get bunches of pallet wood and use it to fire the kiln. And then somebody comes up with the idea that we can take the lint from the laundry and mix it with the office paper, and water in a blender, and make art paper. Every time I come down there they’re doing something new, that sounds like great fun.”

Today Maho Bay and its sister resort Concordia, in progress on the other side of the island, are textbook case studies for eco-construction and sustainability. Concordia improves upon lessons learned with Maho, and includes features like recycled wood, solar power, and cisterns to collect rainwater.

Selengut and his staff are well aware of the Maho deadline, but visitors to the resort have no idea it may soon come to an end. There are a few points in Maho’s favor. Most of the land is not beachfront, and the national park controls the beaches. A resort might not buy without any access to the water. Trust for Public Land is actively pursuing investors to help acquire the land. Maho is also well regarded in the local community, and its guests contribute to local businesses. And Maho’s relationship with the park is tight; Selengut is on the advisory board of the national park system.

But nothing is for certain in real estate. A wealthy billionaire might want to own a private estate, and snap it up for himself.

Nevertheless, Selengut has thought of the worst-case scenario. If he loses Maho, he’s already planned to speed up construction of Concordia. Unlike Maho, Selengut owns all the land for Concordia. When finished, it will be a similar size to Maho, and could accommodate the same number of people.

Concordia reaches a new level of comfort for guests, but truthfully it doesn’t have the lived-in feel of Maho. Beach access isn’t as easy as the original camp. And there are fewer clumsy lizards stumbling around the cabins at night. But at least for the next three years, visitors to St. John can still choose between the two.

“Originally I took a 25-year lease, and then I negotiated for a 12 year extension,” Selengut says. “At that time, 37 years seemed like, God, I was in my 40s. Now I’m 79. Who would ever think that 37 years could pass so quickly?”

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A version of this story appeared in American Way magazine.