Carolyn Campbell — Pima County’s ‘Queen of the Environmentalists’ — abdicates throne

As Carolyn Campbell stood on a stage at her retirement party Saturday night, the longtime conservation leader was presented with a crown.

“We’ve got a little something special for you, queen,” said Christina McVie, her longtime friend and colleague in local environmental battles.

The gift was a callback to a moniker that the late radio show host John C. Scott had assigned Campbell: “the Queen of the Environmentalists.”

For more than a quarter-century, Campbell has been the executive director of the Coalition for Sonoran Desert Protection, an umbrella group of more than 30 local environmental organizations that includes big names like the Center for Biological Diversity, Sky Island Alliance and Tucson Audubon Society and smaller groups such as the Tortolita Homeowners Association and Great Old Broads for Wilderness.

McVie was among the hundred or so guests who filled the Dunbar/Spring Neighborhood’s Whistle Stop Depot just north of Downtown for the Campbell’s celebration. McVie called Campbell her “work wife”; McVie reviews the science and data while Campbell relays it to study committees and elected officials.

“All of our success is the result of relationship building,” McVie said. “Carolyn is the ultimate relationship builder. Nobody’s better at it.”

When Campbell spoke to the crowd, she said it had been “the honor of my life to work with this coalition. This coalition has gotten stuff done.”

That “stuff” included playing a key role in the development of Pima County’s Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan, which included a major initiative to map land in terms of biological importance in order to determine areas that should be conserved and, at the same time, get a better sense of what land was appropriate for development.

The effort was triggered by the listing of the cactus ferruginous pygmy owl as endangered in 1997. The plan was designed to establish critical habitat for the tiny raptor on a countywide basis so individual developers would not have to go through a complex federal process in order to get a federal permit. (The pygmy owl was removed from the endangered species list in 2006 but was classified as a threatened species last year.) But the plan’s eventual scope was such that it has won numerous awards and has been a model for other communities.

Ray Carroll, a Republican who served on the Pima County Board of Supervisors for nearly two decades beginning in 1997, was a key supporter of the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan and credited Campbell as being one of the most important players in its development.

“Almost every step of that conservation plan was a negotiation,” Carroll remembered. “It’s not easy to keep a reputation for honesty through that kind of process, but Carolyn always kept her word.”

Overall, Campbell said she had seen major changes about how developers operate in Pima County. They approach the Coalition for Sonoran Desert Protection to get buy-in on their projects before presenting them to the Board of Supervisors when they are seeking rezonings.

Alongside the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan, Campbell was a leader in the development of the Regional Transportation Authority’s 20-year plan, a collaborative effort regarding roads, transit and related issues that voters approved – along with a half-cent sales tax – in 2006.

When the RTA plan was being drafted, Campbell pushed for wildlife crossings across major roads through wildlife habitat. The crossings, she said, serve dual purposes: They reduce the likelihood that motorists will have collisions with wildlife and make it safer for wildlife to move throughout a wider range, improving biological diversity. The crossings have been a success; Arizona Game & Fish Department cameras have captured images of a wide range of desert creatures using the crossings.

“It’s just as important to keep connectivity between preserves as It is to preserve land in the first place,” Campbell said.

Both the RTA and the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan efforts involved bringing together a wide range of community members to build consensus.

Campbell said in the course of developing both plans, she learned a lot about “listening and educating each other.”

“It’s kind of an overused term, ‘finding common ground.’ But I think you can compromise without compromising your values,” Campbell said. “And I think we’ve all learned you come out ahead.”

“Working to find common ground” were the exact words that Michael Guymon, president & CEO of the Tucson Metro Chamber, used when talking about Campbell. Guymon has worked with Campbell on numerous initiatives in his role at the chamber and earlier in his career at the Metro Pima Alliance and Sun Corridor and called her a “reasonable, devoted and trustworthy partner.”

“She has always kept the interests of our region’s environment at heart while understanding the needs of the business community,” Guymon said.

Tucson Mayor Regina Romero and Pima County Supervisor Adelita Grijalva honored Campbell last week, declaring Sept. 21 – the night of her retirement party – to be Carolyn Campbell Day.

“Everything I know about open space, biodiversity and wildlife, I learned from Carolyn,” Romero said on social media. “She helped me understand that what’s good for wildlife and open space is good for our community.”

Campbell still gets involved in local land-use squabbles. She recently helped in negotiations regarding a parcel of land near 36th Street and La Cholla Boulevard, on the city of Tucson’s western edge. The land was zoned to allow roughly one home per acre; in exchange for higher density allowing 137 homes on 62 acres, the developers agreed to leave 70 percent of the land undeveloped, including the Enchanted Hills Wash. While the deal, approved by the Tucson City Council in 2022, didn’t make all the nearby neighbors happy, Campbell gave it her stamp of approval.

“That wasn’t in the county or in the conservation land system, but (City Councilmember) Lane (Santa Cruz) was really amenable to working on protecting that property,” Campbell said.

Sandy Bahr, who has lobbied at the state Capitol for the Sierra Club’s Grant Canyon chapter for decades, joked that she hoped Campbell’s retirement would mean that she would be spending more time testifying from of lawmakers in Phoenix.

“I know she’s going to keep doing what’s she doing,” Bahr said, “just not getting paid.”

Campbell grew up a “Navy brat,” traveling from base to base until she graduated from high school in the Washington, D.C., area. She remembered enjoying Southern California when her dad was stationed in the San Diego area and, after attending classes at Virginia Tech, decided to head out west to attend ASU.

She earned her undergrad degree but only lasted only one semester in grad school because she landed her “dream job”: Working for then-U.S. Rep. Mo Udall, who represented Southern Arizona from 1961 to 1991.

“Talk about understanding politics and environmental issues and being able to get something done,” said Campbell, who worked for Udall from 1984 to 1990. “I could only wish I was as funny as he was.”

Campbell credited Udall with awakening her interest in environmental politics. “It had a really big lasting effect on me.”

After she left Udall’s employ, Campbell moved to Tucson for a job with a political watchdog nonprofit and, in her spare time, launched the local Green Party. She ran for the Arizona House of Representatives in 1992 on the Green ticket and impressed the local editorial boards so much that she landed endorsements from the Arizona Daily Star, Tucson Citizen and the Tucson Weekly, although she lost her race.

In 1994, Campbell landed a job with then-Tucson City Councilwoman Molly McKasson, who said that Campbell had an “infectious passion” for working with constituents and tackling policy projects in the office.

“She was just a natural,” McKasson said.

When voters put Fred Ronstadt into the Ward 6 office in 1997, Campbell stayed on as an aide to complete some of the projects she was working on but then left the office.

Tucson City Councilman Kevin Dahl, who then headed up the Tucson Audubon Society, said it was around then that he pitched Campbell on the idea of heading up the nascent Coalition for Sonoran Desert Protection, an umbrella group of various nonprofits that had been meeting informally to compare notes as they worked on environmental issues.

Dahl thought Campbell was the right fit for the gig. She had a deep commitment to environmental issues, experience working in local government and “political smarts.”

“I told her, ‘We need someone for a year, maybe two,’” Dahl remembered.

Twenty-six years later, Campbell is giving up the reins on Sept. 30, but she’s not going far. She’ll join the coalition’s board of directors.

She said stepping away from the executive director spot has been “a little nerve-wracking” but she feels like she’s leaving the organization in good hands. She had already given up a lot of her administrative responsibilities to her co-executive director, Kathleen Kennedy , and the coalition is bringing Kate Hutton to take over the job of attending meetings and the rest of Campbell’s public-facing duties.

Campbell said that while she has been the one who has attended public meetings and “jumped up and down in front of public officials,” she gets “a lot of credit for what a lot of other people are doing.”

At Campbell’s retirement party, those people – biologists, activists, friends and family members – stood to testify about Campbell’s impact. Trevor Hare, a herpetologist who worked with the Sky Island Alliance and a longtime supporter of the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan, put it succinctly when he shouted out from the sidelines: “We’re not Phoenix because of Carolyn!”

Besides the crown – which Campbell said didn’t quite fit right “but I will make it so even if I have to melt it down and re-do it!” – Campbell received a watercolor of a cactus ferruginous pygmy owl, the tiny raptor whose endangered species listing back in 1997 led to Campbell’s long career with the coalition.

Campbell loved the painting by local artist Dennis Caldwell.

“It is gorgeous and I guess pretty appropriate,” Campbell said.