Joe Browder

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 2016 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. 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. Besides Ms. Dunlap, Mr. Browder is survived by two sons from a former marriage, Ronald and Monte; and four grandchildren.