Joe Bartles Browder - Obituary

oe 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?” -NEW YORK TIMES Has there been a more dogged supporter of the Florida Everglades than environmentalist Joe Browder? Many might point to the late Marjory Stoneman Douglas and, indeed, her 1947 masterwork, “The Everglades: River of Grass” defined the Everglades as a vital artery in South Florida’s survival. But Browder, a former Miami TV reporter turned environmental activist who died Sept. 18 at 78 of cancer in Maryland, also played a pivotal role in protecting the Everglades. According to University of Florida history professor Jack E. Davis’ 2009 biography, “An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century,” it was Browder who pushed Douglas into a public and political role as the state’s environmental conscience, or “Mother Everglades,” a profile she had never sought but came to enjoy under Browder’s indefatigable prodding. “She was not the one who turned the Everglades into a cause, and she did not seek to join that cause,” Davis wrote. “It had come to her, as she openly acknowledged. Before Browder arrived at her doorstep, the Everglades had been little more than a topic in her writing, at most the focal point, along with the sun's tropical white light, of the geographic region with which she was enamored.” Browder, who founded the influential Friends of the Everglades group with Douglas and also was affiliated with Audubon and Friends of the Big Cypress National Preserve, was as tough as a ’Glades gator in fighting for his causes. “He was a born battler, he was a bulldog, he could step on toes and did step on toes. He often annoyed some of his colleagues and he could be quite rude to his fellow man if he thought they didn’t get it or weren’t active enough in protecting everyone’s national park,” said Nat Reed, a longtime Everglades advocate himself who was an aide to former Florida Gov. Claude Kirk and later President Richard Nixon’s Interior secretary. The pair worked together to convince Kirk to change his mind on several potential environmental disasters. Browder was alongside President Lyndon Johnson when the president designated Biscayne Bay a national monument in October 1968. That White House ceremony proved a major hurdle for two projects that would have forever altered the bay and Miami-Dade County had they been built: an oil port and refinery called Seadade that would have gouged a channel through the bay to a tanker complex near Homestead Air Force Base and Islandia, a proposed series of condos on a string of barrier islands connected by causeways that would have run across the bay. Browder also successfully led the fight against an already commenced Miami International Airport jetport right in the middle of the Everglades with “incredible energy and determination,” Reed said. “This led to Nixon calling us all in to Washington and canceling the project altogether. The federal money ended. Joe Browder was one of the key men who served us all with great distinction.” From 1977 to 1981, during the Jimmy Carter administration, Browder was an official with the U.S. Department of the Interior on energy, natural resources and environmental matters. Browder — who in recent years had run the environmental consulting firm Dunlap & Browder, Inc. in Washington, D.C. — also played a key role in the creation of the Big Cypress National Preserve in the Everglades. “Many of the weekend warriors who adored their freedoms by driving their off-road vehicles in Big Cypress were not sure management by the National Park Service was in their best interest. There’d be rules, regulations. Joe had an enormous capacity to understand this group of people who lived to get away from urban South Florida every weekend. I can honestly say that the hunters and mobile drivers would have opposed the National Park Service becoming stewards of Big Cypress had it not been for Joe. Joe convinced them, and the Miccosukees and Seminoles, that this was the best deal that could happen,” Reed said. There is reason for hope, even confidence, that urban South Florida and supporters of the Everglades will strengthen their common interests, and work for a restructuring of land use, operations and economic responsibilities in the water system that serves all South Florida. The will to do the right and necessary things is certainly here. Joe Browder in a 1990 Miami Herald column. Born in Amarillo, Texas, Browder moved to Miami with his first wife, Joan Browder, and their two sons, Ron and Monte. The two were married for 13 years. “Joe was an avid birder, Audubon Field Guide at his side, as long as I knew him,” she said in an email. “He could find his way around anywhere in the wilderness but always headed off in the wrong direction on a city street. The boys and I use to trek through the cypress strands and ponds of the Big Cypress Swamp, dodging snakes and hoping against aggressive alligators, following in Joe's soggy footsteps.” Author and Politico senior writer Michael Grunwald, in his book, “The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise” praised Browder as a “dogged activist” who “won some amazing battles for the Everglades, Big Cypress, Biscayne Bay and the rest of the ecosystem.” In a 1990 column for the Herald, Browder seemed encouraged by Florida’s progress. “Nowhere else in the United States has experienced both such extraordinary growth in population and development, and such an expansion of the protected landscape and strengthening of environmental regulations.” In an email, Grunwald said, “The earth is in better shape than it would have been if he had never been on it.” Browder is also survived by his wife Louise Dunlap. -MIAMI HERALD Joe Browder, a legendary environmentalist known for winning major battles to protect the Florida Everglades, died Sunday. He was 78. Browder died peacefully at home, surrounded by family, after losing his battle against liver cancer, said his wife and fellow environmental advocate, Louise Dunlap. He's credited with helping to lead the opposition to the construction of a commercial airport on the western edge of the Everglades, pushing to add huge swaths of the fabled marsh and Biscayne Bay land and water to the National Park System, and securing protections for the Big Cypress Swamp. "He was happiest in swamps and deserts," Dunlap said. The Amarillo, Texas, native did a stint as a television reporter and producer for the NBC affiliate in Miami. "He loved it," Dunlap said. "Because he was bilingual, he was able to do a lot of interviews that other people couldn't get." Browder left the news business in 1968 to work full-time on public policy alongside Florida's most famous environmentalist, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, author of the landmark 1947 book "The Everglades: River of Grass." He was hired as the regional representative for the National Audubon Society. His media connections came in handy, said Nathaniel Reed, a longtime Florida environmentalist and former assistant secretary of the Interior who worked closely with Browder. "Nobody had the contacts that Joe had with the press," Reed said. "He had been a reporter, and he drank with them. He got all kinds of insights." Elvis Stahr, the former Audubon president, used to say of Browder, "No other regional director ever used the annual telephone budget in one month," according to Reed. When the organization pushed Browder to move to Atlanta, Browder pushed back. He said, "Heck, no, all the action is in South Florida," Reed said. "There are so many problems that it would be foolish to send me to Atlanta, because I would be in an airplane back and forth to Florida." The group relented, allowing him to remain in the Sunshine State. Joe Browder Joe Browder. Photo courtesy of Louise Dunlap. Reed called Browder "the key man, in my opinion, who thwarted the opposition to the National Park [Service] becoming the owner and the manager of the Big Cypress." He was also "deeply involved in the creation of Biscayne Bay National Monument, which is now a national park." The two worked together to battle the proposed Everglades Jetport, which was slated to be the largest airport in the world built on remote swampland. "He and I worked hand in glove," Reed said. "It was a complete, utter sham, a boondoggle." Browder and Reed sat in the front row at a 1970 public hearing over the jetport, Reed recalled, when the mayor of Dade County read off a long list of questions, responding that each concern was "under study." Reed "stood up and said, 'Mayor, if the answer to 102 legitimate questions is going to be the same, 'It is under study,' you're wasting your time,'" he recalled. The mayor pointed at the two men and said, "You and Browder are white radicals. We're going to build that jetport regardless of you two," Reed said. In the face of broad environmental opposition, work on the jetport was abandoned. "We owe much to him," Reed said of Browder. "In Florida, he drove everybody stark raving mad because he took on the old guard. ... He was Churchillian in the sense that he never gave up. "Joe was a born pit fighter," Reed said. "That sums him up best. It was an era where Florida was changing — dramatically changing — and the environment all of a sudden became a major issue." Browder went on to work for Friends of the Earth and the League of Conservation Voters. LCV President Gene Karpinski said today in a statement, "Joe was an important environmental leader and a good friend for decades. We are so grateful for all that he accomplished, and we will all miss him a great deal." Browder was co-founder of the Environmental Policy Center and coordinator for President Carter's energy and environmental transition team. He later worked as a special assistant at the Interior Department during the Carter administration. "Because of his Florida work, he got to know Jimmy Carter, who was governor," Dunlap said. "The year before Carter got the nomination, we would pick him up from National Airport in my yellow VW convertible," she recalled. Browder met Dunlap in 1970 at a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing. He had come to Washington to testify about the Big Cypress. Dunlap was working for the National Parks Conservation Association. They married a few years later in 1976, after co-founding the Environmental Policy Center. "When he had to be in a tough fight, he was very tough, but he was never disrespectful of the people he was up against," Dunlap said. "He was very principled, he was very strong, but he was very kind, and that's a rare quality." Browder moved to the Washington, D.C., area in 1970. In 1981, he and Dunlap launched their own environmental consulting shop. They lived in Fairhaven, Md., so they could be near the Chesapeake Bay. "We never got vacation," Dunlap said, "so we decided to live in a place where we're on the bay." -GREEN WIRE Joe Browder, a onetime television reporter who became a crusading environmental activist in Florida, where he teamed with Marjory Stoneman Douglas and others to stop a large airport from being built in the Everglades, died Sept. 18 at his home in Fairhaven, Md. He was 78. The cause was liver cancer, said his wife, Louise Dunlap, who ran a Washington-based consulting firm with her husband. In the late 1960s, Mr. Browder gave up a budding career in TV news to become a full-time advocate for the fragile, often-misunderstood environment of South Florida. One of his first successful fights was to preserve the waters of Biscayne Bay, within sight of downtown Miami, from development. He stood next to President Lyndon B. Johnson in October 1968, as the president signed a bill making the bay a national monument. (It is now a national park.) Mr. Browder then turned his attention to a giant airport under construction in the Everglades, the vast swampy region covering hundreds of square miles in South Florida. Everglades National Park had been established in 1947, but not all of the land stretching across the southern Florida peninsula was protected. In the late 1960s, commercial developers, with the support of many of Florida’s political leaders, began work on the airport in the middle of the Big Cypress Swamp, about 50 miles west of Miami. It was six miles from the edge of Everglades National Park. The proposed Everglades Jetport would have been the world’s largest airport, five times the size of John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. By 1970, a 10,500-foot-long runway had been built. Mr. Browder helped galvanize opposition, citing an environmental impact study’s conclusion that the dredging and damming required for the airport would “inexorably destroy the south Florida ecosystem and thus the Everglades National Park.” He also enlisted the support of Douglas, the venerable writer whose 1947 book, “The Everglades: River of Grass,” showed the Everglades to be a delicate, complex ecological community rather than a watery wasteland. Douglas did not consider herself an environmental activist until Mr. Browder persuaded her to take on a more visible role in 1969. “Before Browder came along, she had been content with the semiprivate life of a writer,” University of Florida historian Jack E. Davis wrote in a 2009 biography of Douglas. “She was not the one who turned the Everglades into a cause, and she did not seek to join that cause.” It was Mr. Browder who helped transform the dignified but feisty author into one of the country’s most renowned advocates of environmental preservation. Together, they founded Friends of the Everglades, which became an effective grass-roots lobbying organization. Mr. Browder rallied an unlikely coalition to block the airport, including wildlife conservationists, Miccosukee and Seminole Indians and even “swamp rats” who relied on the Everglades for illegal poaching of alligators. At public meetings, Mr. Browder confronted officeholders, businessmen and aviation officials with scientific studies and a sharp tongue, outlining the devastation such a far-reaching project could have. Property-rights advocates took up arms against him, distributing leaflets declaring him guilty of a crime that “equals any ever committed against mankind.” He received death threats. One elected official condemned Mr. Browder and another environmental activist, Nathaniel P. Reed, as “white radicals.” “He was a born battler,” Reed told the Miami Herald, “he was a bulldog, he could step on toes and did step on toes.” In the early 1970s, Mr. Browder testified at congressional hearings, and Reed became a top official in the Interior Department under President Richard M. Nixon. Ultimately, construction was halted on the Everglades Jetport after federal funding was withdrawn. Mr. Browder drafted the bill that led to the establishment of the Big Cypress National Preserve in 1974, preventing the further development of hundreds of thousands of acres in South Florida. More than 40 years later, the two-mile-long runway remains in place, a ghostly reminder of what might have been. Joe Bartles Browder was born April 10, 1938, in Amarillo, Tex. During World War II, he moved with his family to Miami, where his father was stationed with the Army Air Forces. He became fluent in Spanish, attended Cornell University and, by the early 1960s, was working as a reporter and producer with Miami’s NBC-TV affiliate. After leaving his television job, he was an official with the National Audubon Society in Florida and a founder of the Everglades Coalition, an advocacy group. Mr. Browder settled in Washington in 1970 to work as conservation director of Friends of the Earth. He later helped found an environmental lobbying group before working at the Interior Department from 1977 to 1981, coordinating energy and land management programs. Since 1981, he ran an environmental consulting firm, Dunlap & Browder, with his wife. He worked on preservation efforts around the globe and was an adviser to businesses and public interest groups on climate change. In recent years, he sought to limit damage to the Everglades from Florida’s sugar industry, and he was an advocate for the Everglades Headwaters National Wildlife Refuge and Conservation Area, a federally protected region in central Florida established in 2012. He also negotiated a settlement that led in 2015 to the opening of Maryland’s Franklin Point State Park on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay. His marriages to Joan Arrington Browder, an environmental scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Marion Edey, an environmental activist, ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife of 40 years, Louise Dunlap of Fairhaven; two sons from his first marriage, Ronald Browder of Jacksonville, Fla., and Monte Browder of Davie, Fla.; and four grandchildren. When Mr. Browder was waging his battle against the Everglades Jetport, he knew he needed someone to stand above the fray as a symbol of moral courage. He turned to Douglas, the writer who coined the phrase “River of Grass” to describe the Everglades. He was 31 and she was 79 when they met for tea at her fairy-tale cottage in the Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami. Their partnership resulted in one of the most remarkable chapters in the nation’s history of environmental preservation. -Washington Post One Man’s Vigilance was Our Good Luck Farewell, Joe Browder: 1938-2016 By Sandra Olivetti Martin “Most of what became our woods in 1981 was a farm family’s pasture 40 years ago. We didn’t have the decades to wait for honey-scented flowers to appear again on their own timetable. We also wanted to be able to smell the wild azaleas of the Smokies and Blue Ridge, of the north Florida river forests and the Carolinas,” Joe Browder wrote in the third issue of New Bay Times, which would become Bay Weekly. On May 20, 1993, as the native azaleas bloomed, the gardener — Joe — had been at work a decade reshaping the “cut and regrown woods” surrounding the hilltop home he shared with his wife, Louise Dunlap. As well as those Hammocksweets — named, he noted, by “the word once used in the deepest South to describe a patch of woods in otherwise grassy, marshy low country” — he planted “14 other native American azalea species and hybrids.” Over 35 years, Joe’s woods matured into an encyclopedia of beloved species, diverse magnolias sharing place of pride with native azaleas, making “the air more fragrant, the woods
brighter, the hummingbirds’ and butterflies’ menus more diverse, our lives on the Bay richer.” In an era when “genetic genies are out of the bottle — with millions of non-native, nursery-bred azaleas planted in Bay country — Joe was not an advocate of punctilious correctness. He believed in making the best of the world in which we find ourselves and preserving what we have left. He not only planted but also lived and worked by that philosophy. Joe and Louise lived in Fairhaven, in Southern Anne Arundel County, overlooking Herring Bay. But they worked as environmental lobbyists in Washington. Political animals, we called them, for their intensity and ability to speak to all sides on an issue. Not all of Joe’s clients were perfect; some were genies well out of the bottle, interests that Browder could nudge into earth-friendlier directions. Joe balanced what must be by devoting himself, pro bono, to causes that, if lost, would make our world a far poorer place. In the Florida Everglades, Joe is being recalled as legendary for his success in holding back development. A former TV reporter in Florida turned advocate, Joe helped secure protections for the threatened Big Cypress Swamp, and he helped add vast swaths of sensitive lands and waters to the National Park system. He was a key player in stopping construction — already under way — of a destructive commercial airport in the Everglades. In a Miami Herald obituary this week, Nathaniel Reed, a former top Interior Department official, cited Joe’s “incredible energy and determination” that helped bring about an order from then President Richard Nixon to stop funding for the jetport. Closer to home, in the mid-1990s Joe negotiated between citizen advocates of SACReD — South County Citizens for Responsible Development — and then County Executive John Gary to broker the deal that preserved Franklin Point, Shady Side’s largest tract of undeveloped waterfront land. Franklin Point is now a 477-acre state park, supported by the West/Rhode Riverkeeper so it can be open daily from dawn to dusk. “We really do need to be careful,” Joe wrote in that reflection for old New Bay Times. “The air in these Fairhaven woods will be as sweet for the people who live here 40 years from now, if the families and communities of the Chesapeake are lucky, and vigilant.” Joe was vigilant, and we have been lucky — through, in no small part, the work he did to make it so. Joe and Louise had decades. They lived among azaleas and magnolias, in sight of Chesapeake waters for 35 years. But they did not have decades to lose. Joe Browder died, at home with Louise, in Fairhaven, Sunday, September 18, 2016. -Bay Weekly In the Beginning: Bay Reflection from Vol. I No 1 Often our best learning comes from questions rather than from answers, from wondering about seemingly small details or great mysteries … By Joe Browder The Bay. When said and heard that way, the words mean more than a dictionary’s definition, more than a body of water, sheltered somehow from a larger lake or sea. The Bay means that a person knows about a special place. This awareness is a gift to the people who have it, a relationship to the place and to other people who share the knowledge. The more we learn, from the Bay and from Bay people, the more valuable the gift becomes. Often our best learning comes from questions rather than from answers, from wondering about seemingly small details or great mysteries. In this column, observations about nature and the Bay come from one small place of land, marsh and water in a community on the Western Shore of the Chesapeake — Fairhaven. If Fairhaven were Flamingo or Panacea or Coconut Grove, we would be on bays named Florida, Appalachicola and Biscayne. Every bay is different, but there are some things that many bays have in common. Most bays share what also makes each bay unique: their particular characteristics are greatly influenced by other, distant places. Look at the pines that grow wild around the Chesapeake. Close to water on the Western Shore, and through much of what’s left of the natural pinewood flats of the Eastern Shore, the dominant native pine is the loblolly. The tree is as southern as it sounds, one of the many signs that the Bay, our Bay, is the northernmost part of the south. With long soft needles, and flowers so rich with pollen that spring winds can fill the air with clouds of golden dust, the loblolly clings to our coast but ranges far into the southern U.S. We found our home on the Bay in 1980, quite by accident, when we got lost looking for another great southern tree, the cypress. Although the Bay’s influence allows cypresses to grow naturally up into southern New Jersey and Delaware, one of the northernmost genuine cypress swamps, Battle Creek, is in Maryland near Prince Frederick, in Calvert County. Although we did eventually get to the sanctuary, some very right wrong turns took us first to Fairhaven, miles to the north. There, the smallest of bridges separated the Bay from a shallow, marsh-rimmed pond. To the north and west, the marshes edged into wooded hills where a few houses could barely be seen. The pond’s many acres were clustered with herons and egrets, overflown by terns and gulls. Out on the Bay, osprey were nesting on the channel markers. Ever since, we’ve nested in one of the houses in the hills. In continuous celebration, cypresses we planted that first year are now tall enough to walk under. The cypresses grow near the marsh close to a freshwater spring, with their feet wet and the muck around them punctuated with earthen cones made by crawfish. A few evergreen southern bayberry bushes are in the shrubby fringe between the marsh and the woods, where tall loblolly pines stand out. The scene could almost be along the Georgia coast, perhaps even the Everglades. -Bay Weekly JOE BARTLES BROWDER April 10, 1938 - September 16, 2016 Legendary environmentalist Joe Bartles Browder, passed away peacefully surrounded by family at his home in Fairhaven, Maryland, on Sunday, September 18, 2016, having lost his battle with liver cancer. He was 78. His young great niece and nephew in California decided he had become a bright new star in the sky. His dear friend, Vernon Masayesva, former Hopi Tribal Chairman, said he had joined the cloud people. Born in Amarillo, Texas, a descendent of the last Delaware tribal chairman as well as the founder of Bartlesville, Oklahoma, Joe developed a lifelong love of nature in early childhood exploring nearby Palo Duro Canyon. He became a lifetime birder at an early age searching for natural areas when his family lived in Mexico, Cuba and Florida. He studied ornithology at Cornell University. He was an avid reader, having learned to read newspapers at age 5. He shared a love of books and words with friends and family and was an eloquent prolific writer. He also built an impressive natural history collection. Joe's happiest places were swamps (Big Cypress Preserve), deserts (Cave Creek Canyon in AZ Chiricahua Mountains) and his home by the Chesapeake Bay where over three decades he planted hundreds of native plants including fragrant azaleas, magnolias, perennials and a fern glade under the tall knees of his towering cypress grove. He spent hours patiently photographing panthers in Florida, butterflies, moths, insects, birds, turtles and was known to drive hundreds of miles in the southwest to photograph a specific snake or plant in its natural habitat. Joe understood the importance of place, of natural areas in people's lives from saving small parcels to vast swaths of lands, wetlands and bays. In Maryland he was an advisor to Friends of Jug Bay and negotiated a settlement between a developer, county executive and citizens resulting in preserving 477 acres, now Franklin Point State Park. Joe's passion to protect the Everglades began in 1961 and continued until his death. Everglades protection became part of Joe's environmental DNA. A brief career as a bilingual news reporter and producer (NBC, Miami) prepared him for monumental battles ahead including key strategic leadership roles in designating Biscayne Bay National Monument (1968) which became Biscayne National Park (1980), blocking the planned world's largest airport in the Everglades, creating the Big Cypress Preserve (1974) and adding almost one million acres of lands and waters to the National Parks system in south Florida. The National Park Service recognized Joe as the "Citizen Father of the Big Cypress Preserve". Recognized nationally and internationally for his environmental strategic leadership Joe had an environmental compass that he described as "Nature is my client". He moved to Washington after serving as southeast representative for National Audubon to become the first conservation director, Friends of the Earth, co-founder of Environmental Policy Center and Environmental Policy Institute with Louise Dunlap and others where the first public interest interdisciplinary advocacy team was organized on environmental and energy issues. Joe worked with Governor Jimmy Carter to protect coastal areas then served as director of Carter's energy and environmental transition team followed by serving as an advisor to Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus on energy and natural resources issues. His environmental and energy consulting firm which became DunlapBrowder provided strategic services to businesses, government agencies, public interest groups and native American tribes including the Miccosukee, Seminole, Klamath, Navajo and Hopi. He was an advisor to automotive manufacturers on advanced technologies, alternative fuels and fuel economy. Joe was chair of the Cosmos Club's Natural Resources Group, first treasurer of League of Conservation Voters, served on the steering committee of the California Clean Energy Roundtable, was a member of the Circle of Advisors to the Hopi people's organization, Black Mesa Trust, advisory board of Carnegie Mellon University's Electricity Industry Center, chair of the ChangCe Institute Advisory Committee, co-chaired the Natural Resources section of the first InterAmerican Dialogue on Water Management and founding coordinator, later national chair, Everglades Coalition. He was an advisory board member of National Wildlife Refuge Association, member of Sportsmen's Trust Group that played a vital role in establishment of the new Everglades Headwaters National Wildlife Refuge, and advisory board of Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. One of Joe's gifts was his ability to form diverse coalitions through his respect for others including adversaries and his ability to help people achieve beyond their expectations. His collaboration with revered author, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, in successfully blocking the Everglades jetport was such an example as Joe persuaded her to transition from author to become an effective famous environmental advocate. Joe Browder's survivors include his partner and wife of 40 years, Louise Cecil Dunlap, Fairhaven, MD; former wives Joan Browder and Marion Edey as well as his sons Ronald K. (Sarah), Jacksonville, FL; Monte R. (Mary Elizabeth), Ft. Lauderdale, FL; four grand children: Benjamin, Ali, Elizabeth, Kyle Browder; niece Louisa Santarelli Koplan (David), Studio City, CA; Alessandro Santarelli (Katherine), Ruxton, MD; three great nieces, a great nephew; sister-in-law Constance Dunlap Santarelli and brother-in-law Donald E. Santarelli, Alexandria, VA; and cousins in Austin, TX: A memorial celebration will be held later in the fall. Contributions in Joe's honor are encouraged to the following organizations: National Wildlife Refuge Association 1001 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 905 Washington, DC 20036 Foundation for Pennsylvania Watersheds 9697 Loop Road Alexandria, PA 16611 Black Mesa Trust P.O. Box 33 Kykotsmovi, AZ 86039 Hospice of the Chesapeake 90 Ritchie Highway Pasadena, MD 21122 -Washington Post Death Notice Condolences may be made by accessing the link on this page.