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

 

She 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. A Business 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. She is an Advisory Board Member for the Rural Beacon Initiative – a North Carolina-based social enterprise attempting to connect disinvested, rural, and BIPOC communities to renewable energy and regenerative agriculture; as well as a Member of the Warren County Environmental Action Team's Strategic Planning Team. In collaboration with Rev. Dr. Benjamin Chavis, she 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 in the U.S.

 

Cameron is a 2024 Future Climate Leader with the Aspen Institute, an EE 30 Under 30 Leader with the North American Association of Environmental Education, 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, Atmos Magazine, The Assembly NC, 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 Covering Climate Now’s Student Journalist of the Year (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.