Cameron Oglesby

Cameron Oglesby is a double alum of Duke University, receiving a Master of Public Policy (2023) concentrating in environmental policy, corporate sustainability, and environmental justice, and receiving a Bachelors in Environmental Science and Policy (2021) concentrating in Ecology. An incoming Analyst at McKinsey & Company in Washington D.C., Cameron hopes to utilize both public and private sector influence to build recommendations, partnerships, and solutions that will best serve environmental justice communities.

Cameron has spent her six years in North Carolina working with university and community leaders to establish climate education initiatives, leverage institutional power to foster longstanding relationships, and report on the intersection of environmental racism, infrastructure and policy, and land and agriculture.

Cameron is the project coordinator and creative lead for The Environmental Justice Oral History Project: A storytelling hub and repository that combines the tradition of oral history with student journalism, podcasting, mini-documentary film, educational events, oral history resources, and community-facilitated research to provide a comprehensive view of environmental justice in the U.S. South. She also serves as a representative on the Warren County Environmental Action Team where – in celebration of the 40th anniversary of Environmental Justice – she facilitated a series of regional events that brought together movement icons to discuss Environmental justice: Past, present, and future. In this capacity, she received the Sankofa bird passing of the torch from some of the original Warren County PCB protesters on behalf of the next generation of movement leaders. In further 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.

Cameron is a Young Climate Leader of Color Fellow with the People’s Climate Innovation Center; a Public Voices Fellow on the Climate Crisis with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the Op-Ed Project; an Uproot Project Environmental Justice Reporting Fellow; a Memorial Foundation Social Justice Fellow alumna, and a Doris Duke Conservation Scholar alumna. Her written and audio journalism has appeared in The Nation, The Margin, Grist, Southerly, Scalawag, Environmental Health News, Yale Climate Connections, Earth in Color, and INDY Week. For her consistent coverage of climate and environmental justice in Eastern North Carolina and the U.S. South, she was named a finalist for Covering Climate Now’s Student Journalist of the Year Award (2023), a finalist for the Southern Environmental Law Center’s Reed Environmental Writing Award (2023), and the first-place recipient of the Society of Environmental Journalist’s Student Reporting Award (2022).

Her work is inspired by her own connection to ancestral farmland in Maryland that’s been in her family for almost 100 years; a similar rare show of Black land retention to the communities RBI is working with.