What is the Environmental Justice Oral History Project?
The Environmental Justice Oral History Project is a multi-dimensional storytelling program that aims to elevate and uplift the personal experiences and narratives of historically underserved populations with regard to environmental justice. This project hopes to document a history of environmental experiences in the American South, injustices and place-based pleasures, through communal storytelling, adding a humanist and documentary perspective on environmental issues while advocating for just, equitable, and anti-racist solutions.
What is Environmental Justice? Is it just the “fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people” in “the enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies”?
This project argues environmental justice extends beyond pollution exposure and equal treatment to include land-based joy, and histories and modernities grounded in ancestral connections to nature, place, and space. Environmental Justice is a culture as much as a movement. It is an acknowledgment of past wrongs, present protest, and future well-being.
The Environmental Justice Movement is an under-covered and under-recognized arm of the Civil Rights Movement. Where oral historians have been collecting stories from the champions of the Civil Rights Movement for decades, the Environmental Justice Movement has stewed on the back burner, a forgotten memory in academic spaces and traditional storytelling.
This project uses the tradition of oral history to re-center environmental joy, environmental harm, and environmental justice in mainstream media conversations. In connection with community partners representing the mothers and fathers of the Environmental Justice Movement as well as the next generation of movement leaders, this collection is an attempt to bring the under-covered, under-reported, and under-resourced to the forefront.
Community Partners
Community partnership and community-ownership represent the core of the EJ Oral History Project ethic. We are extremely grateful for the time and insights our partners have given us as well as the faith they place in us to document, archive, and showcase their stories.
INSTITUTIONAL
PARTNERS
The EJOHP seeks to utilize institutional powers and resources to elevate the voices and narratives of historically disinvested communities. To that end, we appreciate the support of our institutional sponsors: university partners who have lent us their funding, expertise, or long-term archives.
Who We ARE
Our work would not be possible without the effort, patience, flexibility, and care of our partners and volunteer oral historians, journalists, and advocates. We are extremely proud of the epiphanies, laughter, progress, and fellowship we’ve fostered as a part of this process.
To learn more about our amazing student and volunteer team members, check out the individual oral history and collection pages.
LEADERSHIP TEAM
Cameron Oglesby
Founder + Project Lead
Cameron is an internationally awarded environmental justice (EJ) organizer, oral historian, and journalist who has worked for nearly a decade to establish climate education initiatives, redistribute resources to frontline organizers, and report on environmental racism, climate, policy, and land in the U.S.
In addition to spearheading this project, she has been featured on panels, in the written word, and in documentary film alongside the originators of the Environmental Justice Movement, and continues to work directly with foundations and several Southeast organizations on their strategy-building, capacity-building, and storytelling efforts. In collaboration with movement leaders, she has contributed a chapter on building narrative power for EJ movements to the “Liberation Stories” anthology and is currently writing a primer on the history of environmental racism and climate movements in the U.S. with movement icon, Rev. Dr. Benjamin Chavis.
Cameron is a National Geographic Young Explorer; Young, Gifted, and Green 40 Under 40 Awardee; Aspen Institute Future Leader Climate Fellow; and 30 Under 30 Leader with the North American Association for Environmental Education who has spoken about storytelling as a powerful climate solution on panels with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), and NATO. Her reporting – recognized by the Sierra Club, Southern Environmental Law Center, Covering Climate Now, and the Society of Environmental Journalists – has been featured in Grist, The Nation, Environmental Health News, Southerly, Scalawag, and Yale Climate Connections among others.
Cameron received her Master in Public Policy and Bachelors in Environmental Science and Policy from Duke University. Her work is inspired by her own connection to ancestral farmland that’s been in her family for 100 years.
She serves as the primary director and organizer for the EJ Oral History Project including strategic development, fundraising, journalistic content creation, outreach, and management of oral histories and other resources with community and academic partners.
Amanda Ostuni
Transcription Manager (2023-Present)
Amanda Ostuni has a Master of Public Policy from Duke University, and a BA in Journalism from Northeastern University. She spent nearly two years as a reporter for a daily newspaper in Massachusetts, before leaving to serve in an AmeriCorps disaster relief program. Through that service experience, she gained deep insight into myriad of environmental issues and injustices across the South. It bolstered her interest in human rights advocacy, and though after the program she spent a few more years working in various media roles, in 2020, she began transitioning toward a policy career. Today, she’s leveraging her communications skills and policy/political knowledge to improve social justice by conducting outreach and casework for the unhoused population in NYC, and by providing transcript and journalistic support to the EJ Oral History Project.
Project Mentors
The EJ Oral History Project is committed to cultivating relationships that ensure our projects and processes lean on best storytelling and community-engagement practices as well as principles of environmental justice. Our “mentors”, who have served as sounding boards, advisors, and supports at varying stages in project development, help us in maintaining our commitment to intentional, community-owned storytelling.
Wesley Hogan
Wesley Hogan is Research Professor at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. In June 2021, she concluded an 8-year tenure as Director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke. Between 2003-2013, she taught at Virginia State University, where she worked with the Algebra Project and the Young People’s Project. She writes and teaches the history of youth social movements, human rights, documentary, and oral history. She co-facilitates a partnership between the SNCC Legacy Project and Duke, The SNCC Digital Gateway, whose purpose is to bring the grassroots stories of the civil rights movement to a much wider public through a web portal, K12 initiative, and set of critical oral histories.
Wesley was one of the original faculty advisors and the primary oral history support during the Environmental Justice Oral History Project establishment at Duke University (2021-2023). She continues to provide guidance on academic oral history collection practices for the initiative.
Iris Crawford
Iris M. Crawford is a movement journalist and strategic communicator living on Lenapehoking ancestral lands, now known as New City City. She is the Climate Justice Senior Editor at Nonprofit Quarterly and has reported on solutions around the just transition, environmental science, decarbonization, and the intersections between race, culture, and climate inequity. What led her to journalism was grassroots organizing, where she worked with frontline communities across the Western US and helped push for community power and energy justice in California. Most recently, she was a 2024 Mellon Environmental and Epistemic Justice Fellow at Wake Forest University. Her work has appeared in NPQ, The Guardian, Civil Eats, San Francisco Chronicle, and Prism, among other publications. She is a board member of the Uproot Project, a support network of environmental journalists of color. Iris holds a BA from Syracuse University and an MS in Science Writing from MIT.
Iris has been a long-time strategic support for the Environmental Justice Oral History Project, particularly in connection to journalistic partnerships and broader distribution strategy.
Maggie Lemere
Maggie Lemere is a filmmaker, oral historian, and National Geographic Explorer who examines humanity’s relationship with
Maggie has served as a mentor and advisor for the Environmental Justice Oral History Project since 2024 in her capacity as a National Geographic Explorer and connected to her expertise with community oral history and documentary film.
Anjali Boyd
Anjali D. Boyd is a marine scientist, technologist, and storyteller who works across sectors to develop innovative solutions for ocean sustainability. Her career spans academia, government, non-profit, & private sectors, where she consistently bridges the gap between cutting-edge research, policy, and technological innovation to drive meaningful change in the Ocean Economy.
As a Ph.D. Candidate and Dean’s Graduate Fellow at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, Anjali‘s research focuses on developing scalable solutions for marine ecosystem conservation. She is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, Ford Fellow & National Geographic Explorer, whose work has earned recognition from the Smithsonian, NOAA, National Academy of Sciences, & Aspen Institute.
Throughout her career, Anjali has been a transformative leader in advancing equity within marine sciences. As a founding board member of Black Women in Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Science (BWEEMS), she helped grow the organization into a global community of 500+ members across 22 countries. Her leadership in professional societies, including the Ecological Society of America, Coastal & Estuarine Research Federation, and Society of Wetland Scientists, has resulted in concrete institutional changes—from diversifying editorial boards to establishing dedicated funding for underrepresented scientists. As an Early Career Liaison to the US National Committee for UN Decade of Ocean Science, she served on the National Academies’ Committee on Cross-Cutting Themes, helping shape the 2022 strategic framework that defined U.S. priorities and innovative ‘Ocean-Shots’ for the Decade. At the local government level, she served as an elected Soil and Water Conservation District Supervisor in Durham, NC (2020-24), where she implemented science-based strategies and expanded equitable resource access for minority farmers & business owners.
Anjali has brought her expertise in ecological education as a strategic support for the Environmental Justice Oral History Project since it’s inception at Duke University.
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