This film deals with the global dilemma of economic growth versus species preservation.
San Bruno Mountain provides a context to explore these complex questions. The mountain is San Francisco's lost landscape, a mostly intact remnant of the ecosystem that once covered the city's hills. It is the site of the nation's first Habitat Conservation Plan, a controversial compromise that trades development for additional habitat preservation and management.
For fifty years, people have fought to protect San Bruno Mountain and its rare butterflies. Told with humor and insight by participants and observers alike, Butterflies & Bulldozers is a story about the rights of nature and the rights of people, about compromise and commitment, and the tough choices we all have to make.
Conservation, without a keen realization of its vital conflicts, fails to rate as authentic human drama; it falls to the the level of a mere Utopian dream. ~Aldo Leopold
