Joe Browder, a television reporter turned environmentalist who was instrumental in preserving Florida’s Everglades, vast areas nearby and Biscayne Bay, died on Sept. 18 at his home in Fairhaven, Md. He was 78.
His wife, Louise Cecil Dunlap, a fellow environmentalist, said the cause was liver cancer. She and her husband were partners in Dunlap & Browder, a Washington consulting firm.
An early conservation effort of Mr. Browder’s began in 1969, when as a Florida environmentalist he put together an eclectic coalition that proved successful in preventing the construction of a jetport in the Big Cypress Swamp, an ecological system of marshes, bogs and hammocks just north and west of Everglades National Park. The jetport would have been the world’s largest.
The group included Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the crusading grande dame of Everglades conservation; Native American tribes; hunters; newly formed environmental groups, and ultimately the administration of President Richard M. Nixon.
“Suddenly, Joe Browder himself got rid of the jetport,” Ms. Douglas, who died in 1998, said in an interview with Florida International University in 1983.
Taking its case to Congress, the coalition not only blocked the jetport plan, it also persuaded the federal government to protect thousands more acres, including in the adjacent Everglades, and it generated support for legislation that required environmental-impact studies to be done before the federal government subsidized major public works projects.
Today, Big Cypress National Preserve, established in 1974, encompasses more than 700,000 acres. The National Park Service later declared him Citizen Father of the Big Cypress Preserve, where he worked to protect the rights of local tribes.
Mr. Browder also successfully lobbied to extend Park Service protection to Biscayne Bay. In 1968, he looked on as President Lyndon B. Johnson signed legislation establishing what became Biscayne National Park, comprising almost 173,000 acres of water and coral reef keys.
“It’s cliché to call someone an unsung hero, but that was Joe Browder,” Jack E. Davis, a history professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, said in an email. “People typically recognize Marjory Stoneman Douglas as the founding spirit of Everglades protection, but it was Joe who, back in the 1960s, cajoled her into taking up the cause, one in which he was already deeply involved.”
Besides his lobbying and coalition-building, Mr. Browder influenced environmental and energy policy as a special assistant at the Interior Department during the administration of President Jimmy Carter. He was also the conservation director of Friends of the Earth and the treasurer of the League of Conservation Voters.
If Mr. Browder’s embrace of nature made him an effective evangelist, his implacability could also alienate some allies and cast some potentially worthy compromises — like the sugar industry’s belated agreement to clean up the Everglades — as sellouts to corporate greed.
“Joe hasn’t always gotten the credit he deserved for the remarkable work he did,” said Michael Grunwald, the author of “The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise” (2006), “but the Earth is in better shape because he was on it.”
Joe Bartles Browder was born on April 10, 1938, in Amarillo, Tex., the son of Edward Browder, an aviator, and the former Betty Bartles, who ran a small business. He was descended on his mother’s side from a Delaware Indian chief.
He was raised in Havana, Mexico and California before moving to Miami, where his family was housed with Army Air Forces officers during World War II. It was there he developed his fascination with the South Florida swamps. He won a scholarship to study ornithology at Cornell University but dropped out because of insufficient funds.
Mr. Browder became a television reporter and producer for the NBC affiliate in Miami in the 1960s. But even then, he was a leader of the National Audubon Society in Florida. He left broadcasting in 1968 to devote himself to environmentalism and was the founding coordinator of the Everglades Coalition.
When he and Nathaniel Reed, a former assistant Interior secretary, teamed to oppose the proposed jetport, near the border between Miami-Dade and Collier Counties, Miami-Dade’s mayor branded them “white militants.”
But they successfully lobbied the aviation industry and persuaded the Nixon administration to withdraw federal funding for the jetport after demonstrating that it would endanger wetlands and the dwindling alligator population.
“Joe was a conservation hero who proved that one person can change the world,” David Houghton, the president of the National Wildlife Refuge Association, said in a statement. “Big Cypress National Preserve, Everglades National Park and Everglades Headwaters National Wildlife Refuge and Conservation Area are testament to his profound passion and dedication.”
Besides Ms. Dunlap, Mr. Browder is survived by two sons from a former marriage, Ronald and Monte; and four grandchildren.
Mr. Browder met Ms. Dunlap at a Senate hearing on the jetport and persuaded her to join Friends of the Earth. She had been studying landscape architecture and was working for the National Parks Conservation Association. (She went on to help found and become the president of the Environmental Policy Institute and the Environmental Policy Center in Washington.)
“Look at it this way, Louise,” she recalled Mr. Browder telling her. “Would you rather have some influence over deciding where the airport will be located, or would you rather decide where to plant the trees and grass around the parking lots?”
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