Jerome Ringo, who as the leader of the National Wildlife Federation became the first Black chairman of a major conservation organization, spurred to activism in his native Louisiana by witnessing the ravages of climate change and the disproportionate environmental damage done to poor minority communities by the petrochemical industry, died on April 30 in New Orleans. He was 70.
The cause of his death, in a hospital, was a brain aneurysm, his stepdaughter Tayla Phillips said.
Mr. Ringo spent most of his life in his hometown, Lake Charles, in southwest Louisiana. He grew up hunting and fishing in the bayous and marshes that gave the state its nickname, the Sportsman’s Paradise. The experience made him appreciative of the beauty of nature, but it also made him aware of Louisiana’s ecological vulnerabilities.
He observed the continued erosion of the coastline, which scientists say is losing the equivalent of a football field of wetlands about every 100 minutes.
And he suffered through the pummeling of hurricanes that have grown more intense in recent years. Hurricane Laura, which severely damaged Mr. Ringo’s home in 2020, and Hurricane Ida, in 2021, tied an 1856 storm as the strongest ever recorded in Louisiana, with catastrophic 150-mile-an-hour winds.
“The single greatest issue for me as an environmentalist is climate change,” Mr. Ringo told Mother Jones magazine in 2005.
Beginning in 1975, Mr. Ringo spent two decades employed in Louisiana’s booming petrochemical industry. While the significance of oil, gas and petrochemicals as an economic force in the state has since declined, the industry remains important there, and it has long been favored with limited regulation.
Working offshore on platforms and onshore at refineries that processed crude oil into fuels and solvents like benzene, a carcinogen, Mr. Ringo came to see environmentalism as a matter of social justice.
Those who live in the shadow of refineries and chemical plants in and around Lake Charles, and in the dense chemical corridor along the Mississippi River known as Cancer Alley, are predominantly Black and poor, as Mr. Ringo would later stress in interviews, noting that they suffer inordinately high rates of cancer and respiratory diseases. (Scientific studies have confirmed that elevated risks of certain cancers are associated with industrial pollutants.)
There was a psychological toll as well, Mr. Ringo told the New Orleans newspaper The Gambit in 2005. “You’ve got procedures like ‘shelter in place,’ which is designed for people to respond to the release of toxic gases and chemicals,” he said. “Community members know they’re at risk every day.”
Mr. Ringo gave impetus to the idea that the wildlife, climate and environmental justice crises are interrelated and must be addressed jointly, Collin O’Mara, the president and chief executive of the National Wildlife Federation, said in an interview.
“Jerome’s argument was that pollution affects people and wildlife alike,” Mr. O’Mara said. “Whether folks want to go birding and hunting or just want their kids to be able to breathe the air and drink the water, they should be working together.”
In 1991, Mr. Ringo became one of the first Black members of the Louisiana Wildlife Federation. In the mid-1990s, he took early retirement from the petrochemical industry and devoted himself full time to advocacy. He urged officials in Washington and Louisiana to enact tighter regulations on pollution and encouraged residents to express their concerns at public hearings.
In 1996, Mr. Ringo joined the board of the National Wildlife Federation. He was also a delegate to the negotiations for the Kyoto Protocol climate agreement reached in 1997, according to Yale University, where he later served as a research scholar.
In 2005, he became the first Black chairman of the board of the National Wildlife Federation — or of any major national conservation organization, the federation said — and served a two-year term. From 2005 to 2010, he was also president of the Apollo Alliance, a clean-energy coalition of business, labor, environmental and community leaders.
Jeremy Symons, who was senior vice president of the National Wildlife Federation when Mr. Ringo was chairman, said in an email that Mr. Ringo “was the Neil Armstrong of the wildlife conservation movement, a pioneer who did what nobody else had done because it needed to be done.”
Jerome Claude Ringo was born on March 2, 1955, in Lake Charles, La. His father, Earl, was a postal worker and a civil rights activist; his mother, Nellie (Huddleston) Ringo, was a nurse.
From a young age, Jerome was imbued with a sense of social justice.
In 1967, he and his brothers were among the first Black students to begin integrating public schools in Lake Charles. Resistance was immediate. Years later, he told friends that when he was in middle school he was frequently beaten by white students. And he often recounted the story of the time his family woke in the middle of the night to hear Klansmen shouting, and found a 13-foot cross burning in the front yard.
He attended McNeese State University, in Lake Charles, and Louisiana Tech University, in Ruston, but he left before graduating, drawn to high-paying jobs in the petrochemical industry. Advocacy became a companion to his work, and later his permanent career.
An impassioned and inspiring speaker, Mr. Ringo was indefatigable in seeking to broaden the environmental movement so that it would “look more like America,” he told The Gambit in 2005. As his platform grew, he helped facilitate conservation projects for students in minority neighborhoods, lectured at historically Black colleges and universities, and spoke at meetings of the Congressional Black Caucus.
In a 2005 interview with NPR, Mr. Ringo explained the challenge of recruiting Black people to conservation groups, which have traditionally consisted mostly of white hunters and anglers. “Those were the people that I would say would fish to hang the fish on the wall,” he said. “Those people that fished to put the fish on the plate simply didn’t join clubs, and couldn’t afford to anyway.”
His efforts at diversification were successful, to a point. Roughly half of the combined board of directors and senior staff of the National Wildlife Federation are now people of color. Ben Jealous, a former chief executive of the N.A.A.C.P., is now executive director of the Sierra Club.
Minority involvement is “better than it was,” Mr. O’Mara said. “But it’s nowhere near where it needs to be.”
In 2006, Mr. Ringo appeared briefly in the Academy Award-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” which chronicled former Vice President Al Gore’s campaign to call attention to global warming. In 2008, he appeared on a panel at the Democratic National Convention.
From 2005 to 2020, Mr. Ringo and his wife, Mary (Guidry) Ringo, whom he married in 2002, served as pastors of Faith Vision Ministries, which they founded in Lake Charles. He would often speak openly about his recovery in midlife from drug dependency, which he said helped strengthen his commitment to uplifting others while bolstering his faith and his drive to persevere.
His wife survives him. In addition to Ms. Phillips, her daughter, he is also survived by Mrs. Ringo’s other daughter, Brittany Richards-Pete; a son, Jerome Ringo II, and a daughter, Earlandra Ringo-Finnie, from his marriage to Marve Sevier; three brothers, Bennie, Ronnie and Wendell Ringo; and six grandchildren.
Mr. Ringo’s most recent project was putting his advocacy into action by co-founding Zoetic Global, a company dedicated to fighting climate change in the developing world by providing communities with renewable energy, reliable water and food security.
In a 2021 interview with CNBC, Mr. Ringo said he remained hopeful, buoyed by the parallel successes, decades earlier, of the civil rights movement and the women’s movement.
“The climate movement is no different,” he said. “The only thing that guarantees us to lose is to quit.”
Jeré Longman is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk who writes the occasional sports-related story.
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