Maeveen Behan: Sonoran Desert Defender

By Kathy McMahon

The Sonoran Desert encompasses roughly 100,000 square miles in parts of northwestern Mexico, southern Arizona, and southeastern California. Considered one of the most biologically diverse deserts in the world, it’s home to more than 100 reptiles, 2,000 native plants, 60 mammals, and 350 bird species. This extraordinary diversity is due, in part, to its geographical breadth, which includes coniferous and deciduous forests, desert, grasslands, and riparian habitats. It is the only place in the world where the iconic saguaro cactus grows.  

Managing urban growth within this sensitive environment is an ongoing challenge, but in Southern Arizona’s Pima County, the visionary, award-winning Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan (SDCP) serves as a guide.  

It all began with a small bird—the cactus ferruginous pygmy owl, which nests inside saguaro cacti. In 1997, after the owl was placed on the endangered species list, the building of schools, roads, housing developments, and more ground to a halt in Pima County because developers were stripping the land of the owl’s habitat. Environmentalists and developers were at an impasse.  

Enter Maeveen Marie Behan. 

Born in 1961 in Wisconsin, Maeveen Behan lived in several states growing up and was the first woman in Georgia to break the six-minute mile. A voracious reader and lifelong learner, Behan received an undergraduate degree in English before earning her law degree, and later, a PhD in Arid Land Studies. 

 She and her husband, Harry Goldwasser, first moved to Chinle, Arizona, where she spent time working for the Navajo Nation before moving to Tucson in 1992. Shortly thereafter, Behan began working for Pima County.  

 In 1998, Behan, and others, were tasked to create a county-wide land assessment plan which could be used to inform decisions surrounding urban growth. Over time, she became the principal architect and de facto leader of what would become Pima County’s Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan which seeks to preserve key biological resources and wildlife habitat.  

Behan’s genius was to persuade an 85-member steering committee representing a wide swath of disparate community members, including environmentalists, ranchers, developers, and Indigenous peoples, to sit down together, talk, and eventually reach a compromise. It was a complicated, and sometimes heated, process which laid the framework of the final plan that, in simple terms, offsets development impacts with land conservation —encouraging development in less ecologically sensitive areas and leaving high-sensitivity habitat areas intact.  

Today, the award-winning SDCP continues to guide and inform land-use decisions, and the 2004 voter-approved open space bonds conserve habitat and ranches and protect cultural and historic resources.  

The impact of the plan on the community cannot be underestimated as it allows for people, plants, and animals of the region to benefit from these conservation lands.  

 On November 3, 2009, Behan watched on television as the Pima County Board of Supervisors renamed the county’s million-acre conservation preserve the Maeveen Marie Behan Conservation Lands System as a tribute to her tireless and seminal work on the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan. Minutes later, knowing she had established long-term stewardship of the land, she died of cancer at the age of 48.