Butters Canyon Conservancy, previously Butters Land Trust conserves wild landscapes in Butters Canyon, along Peralta Creek and promotes environmental awareness throughout the watershed to preserve vital habitat for all Bay Area residents to enjoy.

Progress to Date

Butters Canyon is a half-mile stretch of wild, woodsy land along Butters Drive, just off Joaquin Miller Road in Oakland, California. This serene oasis of native trees houses hundreds of species of wildlife and plants and represents a green riparian and wildlife corridor at the headwaters of Peralta Creek. The canyon is enjoyed daily by dozens of neighbors and people around the bay, including many groups of cyclists.

The treasure that is the canyon has become threatened in recent years by housing development, and neighbors organized in 1999 to form Friends of the Last Wild Canyon to preserve it. Searches for funding ran into a continuing difficulty: the need for a legal entity in the neighborhood to hold title to lands and to hold conservation easements.

To most effectively preserve wild lands, neighbors formed the non-profit corporation as the Butters Land Trust in June 2001. Since the inception of the land trust, a total of eleven creekside lots have been preserved, either through acquisition by Butters Canyon Conservancy of the lot itself or a conservation easement, or acquisition by the City of Oakland and dedication as open space.

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I know of no movement as convincing, as effective, as compassionate as the land trust movement. It is like water, seeping into the most unexpected places; rising, falling, rising, falling, filling the basins of the human heart.

-Terry Tempest Williams, author