Robert H. Boyle, a Brooklyn-born sportswriter and angler who became the unofficial guardian of the Hudson River as a crusading conservationist and a founder of a widely replicated watchdog group called Riverkeeper, died on Friday in Cooperstown, N.Y. He was 88.

The cause was cancer, his daughter, Stephanie Boyle Mays, said.

Mr. Boyle’s childhood affection for the river and for fishing — he went to boarding school in Highland Falls, N.Y. — were rekindled when he moved to Croton-on-Hudson from the West Coast in 1960 only to discover that decades of neglect had left the river (actually a tidal estuary) threatened by industrial pollution.

In 1965, he joined Scenic Hudson and other groups in a lawsuit against a proposed Consolidated Edison nuclear power plant at Storm King in the Hudson Highlands, warning that water-intake equipment would kill small fish.

Their suit resulted in the first federal court ruling affirming the right of citizens to mount challenges on the basis of potential harm to aesthetic, recreational or conservational values as well as tangible economic injury.

In 1970, as a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, Mr. Boyle was among the first journalists to report that North American fish were contaminated with toxic polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. He also sounded an early alarm about global warming in his articles 30 years ago.

He was also an ardent foe of Westway, the proposed $2 billion highway in Manhattan that would have tunneled under a man-made park on the Lower West Side. The plan was ultimately scuttled in 1985 after a court ruled that the project might have doomed the river’s striped-bass population.

“Allowing Westway to be built would be to fire a torpedo at Noah’s ark,” Mr. Boyle said at the time.

Robert Hamilton Boyle Jr. was born on Aug. 21, 1928, to Robert Sr. and the former Elizabeth Coundouris of the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. He grew up in Manhattan, in the Murray Hill section.

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