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.