National Preserve Dunlap & Browder – Environmental Consulting Firm Further biography and environmental activism 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." Previously, the chapter of the Audubon Society in Miami, with which Browder was affiliated, had become embroiled in a battle with a developer named Ludwig, who attempted to put an oil refinery in Lower Biscayne Bay. Browder is described by Douglas as the "hardest working" activist in the crusade against Ludwig's refinery. This small victory by conservationists soon led to the more difficult battle previously described and more widely noted, against the International Airport. Browder secured a federal mandate to prevent water from being diverted from the then-dying Everglades National Park. Browder conferred with the Nixon administration, and finally with President Richard Nixon, in a successful effort to save the Everglades from encroachment through development of an already commenced project to build a new Miami International Airport, in what is now part of the National Park system in the Everglades. Life magazine, July 4, 1970, states that Browder, along with Miami attorney Daniel Paul, led the battle against the 39 square mile airport, which it refers to as a "great victory" for the conservation effort. As a result of meeting with Browder, Nixon