Cameron Oglesby

Cameron is an environmental justice organizer, oral historian, award-winning journalist, and developing author who is dedicated to re-centering the voices, narratives, and knowledge of historically disinvested communities in conservation, environmental policy, storytelling, and corporate decision-making.

A double alum of Duke University (‘21 & ‘23), Cameron, in partnership with prominent leaders and movement icons, has spent her six years in North Carolina working with university and community leaders to establish climate education initiatives, leverage institutional power, and report on the intersection of environmental racism, infrastructure and policy, and land and agriculture. Her journalism has appeared in The Nation, The Assembly NC, Atmos Magazine, Grist, Southerly, Yale Climate Connections, and Earth in Color. She is an Advisory Board Member for the Rural Beacon Initiative, a member of the Warren County Environmental Action Team's Strategic Planning Committee, and is the project lead for The Environmental Justice Oral History Project: A storytelling hub and repository combining a diverse set of storytelling modalities to provide a comprehensive view of environmental justice in the U.S. South. In collaboration with movement elders, Cameron is currently writing her first book: a primer on the layered history of environmental racism and the under-covered history of Black land ownership, health disparities, and nature access from the antebellum to today.
She is a National Geographic Young Explorer, 2024 Aspen Institute Future Leader Climate Fellow, Covering Climate Now’s 2023 Student Journalist of the Year Awardee, a 2023 NAAEE Environmental Education 30 Under 30 Leader, and a 2022 Yale/Op-Ed Project Public Voices Fellow on the Climate Crisis.
Cameron’s work is inspired by her own connection to ancestral farmland in Maryland that’s been in her family for almost 100 years.