The Edge of the Wild (2015) is an hour-long documentary by Gail Mallimson. The film is about a contentious land-use battle in the small town of Brisbane, California on San Bruno Mountain just south of San Francisco. San Bruno Mountain is the last remaining native wilderness surrounding San Francisco, and its grassy hills are home to a small, endangered butterfly called the Mission Blue. However, the mountain is also some of the most valuable real estate in the country. For decades, Brisbane has been at the center of a battle between private landowners wanting to build on their land, environmentalists wishing to stop them to protect the butterfly, and local and national officials torn between the two. This battle came to a head in 1982 when real estate developers were able to amend the U.S. Endangered Species Act to allow them to bulldoze the butterfly’s habitat. In exchange, they were required to try to help the butterfly elsewhere. This plan was hailed as a historic compromise by the U.S. Government and has now been emulated across the country, affecting tens of millions of acres of endangered species’ habitats nationwide.
30 years later, houses have replaced much of the butterfly’s habitat on San Bruno Mountain, and Michele Salmon, a lifelong resident of Brisbane, has decided she is fed up with this destruction. When a new real estate development is planned, she joins with her neighbors to challenge the U.S. Government’s decision to allow a multinational corporation to build. Their struggle plays out in front of Brisbane’s city council, where local leaders are forced to choose between acting on behalf of their constituents’ wishes, defying a large corporation threatening to sue them, and towing the U.S. Government’s party line. A lesson in the fragility of our environmental laws, the struggles of local democracy, and the power of ordinary citizens to steward biodiversity, the film is a compelling look at the tensions between private property rights and biodiversity that exists today.
