Joe Browder

Joe Bartles Browder (April 10, 1938 – September 18, 2016) was an American environmental activist who spearheaded ongoing efforts to save the Florida Everglades. He is considered to be a global environmental expert. He is an advisor on energy, climate change, environmental policy to public-interest groups, foundations, auto and energy companies, other businesses, Native American tribes and government agencies. He started out his career as a television news reporter, an active volunteer and later a paid representative for Audubon (the National Audubon Society).

Browder’s place of birth is Amarillo, Texas. Browder worked for NBC (Miami, Florida) as a television news report and producer. He is married to Louise Dunlap. He has been active in saving the Everglades since 1961. He is recognized as being responsible in founding the Biscayne National Park (1968) and the Big Cypress National Preserve (1974), both in Florida. The Bob Graham Center for Public Service, (Florida Senator), states that Browder "emerged from the grassroots in the early 1960s to help save South Florida’s most precious natural wonders from unrestrained forces of growth." Because of Browder's work in spearheading the creation of the Big Cypress National Preserve, The National Park Service eventually named Browder "Citizen Father of the Big Cypress Preserve". He died at the age of 78 on September 18, 2016 of cancer, in Maryland.

As a young man, Browder had received a scholarship in ornithology from Cornell University, but dropped out to get married. Browder had convinced journalist, feminist and environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas who had written the influential book The Everglades: River of Grass in 1947, to start an environmental organization to save the Everglades. That organization became known as Friends of the Everglades, which was created to protest the creation of the Miami International Airport in the Big Cypress portion of the Everglades that Browder was so opposed to. The book An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century (Environmental History and the American South), quotes Marjory Douglas as one who admired the stamina of the activists, especially Joe Browder, the good soldier of nature who stood on the front lines of each successive battle. Browder himself was inspired by Douglas' book The Everglades: River of Grass for its sobering history, "literary power" and "ethical voice". J. Brooks Flippen, in the book, Conservative Conservationist: Russell E. Train And the Emergence of American Environmentalism, refers to the 1968 Joe Browder as a "young, long-haired environmentalist...typical of the new generation of activists," and states that "most of the established conservation groups hardly welcomed him."

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