GEORGETOWN – Peter W. Cox, a co-founder of Maine Times and an advocate for the state’s environment, died Thursday night after a battle with esophageal cancer. He was 67.

In addition to Maine Times, a statewide weekly whose introduction coincided with the birth of the state’s environmental movement, Cox had a hand in founding the Maine Downtown Center, the University of Maine’s Public Policy Scholars mentoring program and Wolfe’s Neck Farm’s natural beef program.

Cox, whose father served in the State Department under Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, thrust himself into the worlds of Maine journalism and politics after graduating from Yale University in 1959.

He was editor of the Bath Daily Times in the mid-1960s and ushered the merger of that newspaper with the Brunswick Record in 1967 to form The Times Record.

“For anybody working in Maine journalism, Peter Cox is one of the heroes,” said James M. McCarthy, The Times Record’s managing editor.

Campbell B. Niven, chairman and former publisher of The Times Record, said Cox’s most important journalistic achievement was probably co-founding the Maine Times with John Cole in 1968.

“We had two basic reasons for starting the Maine Times,” Cox once wrote. “We wanted to cover issues rather than events and we believed in the community of Maine.”

Cox sold the newspaper in 1985. It ceased publication in 2002, although it emerged briefly after that as a monthly magazine.

Cox’s survivors include his wife, Eunice, and two children, Tony and Sara, both of Bowdoinham.

The family said no public funeral service was planned.