Team profile by members of the project team

The Environmental Justice Oral History Project (EJOHP) is a multi-dimensional storytelling program that aims to elevate the personal experiences and narratives of historically underserved populations with regard to environmental justice. It is a developing storytelling hub that works to elevate the place-based narratives of Southern environmental justice communities through oral history collection, long-form journalistic and podcast partnerships, community research and education and events. This project hopes to document a history of environmental experiences in the American South through communal storytelling, adding a humanist and documentary perspective to environmental issues while advocating for just, equitable and anti-racist solutions.

This project argues that 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 EJOHP uses the tradition of oral history and storytelling 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.

“Throughout this project, I have come to realize that oral histories are so much more than just the collection of the primary sources you read in the tiny boxes in the bottom corners of the pages of history textbooks. They are, when done properly, someone’s voice preserved, their telling of their own life preserved not for some historian fifty years from now, but because they deserve the dignity of being heard, of telling their own story rather than that historian, that magazine writer, that politician telling it for them.” –Madeline Waterfield, Undergraduate Team Member

Over the course of the 2022-2023 school year, team members worked with community partners in Warren County, Piney Woods Free Union and across the country to produce a series of archivable materials documenting untold environmental histories in Black and Brown communities and among movement allies. Students were trained in environmental justice history and policy, oral history interviewing and archiving methods, and principles to decolonize ways of thinking, knowing and interacting with historically disinvested communities. 

Students also engaged in thought exercises, participated in lectures from guest speakers, and attended community gatherings designed to engrain a sense of responsibility, camaraderie, respect and intentionality in the way students interacted with community and captured their stories. The goal was to get students on a path away from extractive and exploitative community engagement and storytelling to one that is not only collaborative but centering of community needs and experiences. 

“While I have discovered much about the foundation of the environmental justice movement in North Carolina and beyond, I believe my growing appreciation for the power of storytelling, the basis of oral history collection, is the greatest strength that I have gained from the project.” –Meghna Parameswaran, Undergraduate Team Member

Final project deliverables include:

• 45+ oral histories collected from community elders and advocates across the South, including small collections in Piney Woods Free Union in Jamesville, the Union Hill neighborhood in Virginia (which successfully fought against the Atlantic Coast Pipeline) and the Gulf South region.
• 10+ “In Conversation, In Community” podcast episodes combining interactive sound displays and profile interviews to cover a wide range of environmental and environmental justice issues and experiences.
• 4+ long-form articles focused on community-identified topics, histories and solutions in North Carolina, Alabama, Texas and Louisiana. 
• 2 mini documentaries about the Warren County protests of 1982 and the 300+ year tri-racial history of the Piney Woods Free Union community. 

The EJOHP included a research arm which took place in Summer 2022 as a part of the Story+ program. In connection with the EJOHP, several events commemorating the 40th anniversary of the environmental justice movement were staged in September 2022. All these programs, including the EPA’s landmark announcement of a new Department of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights in Warren County, featured our project team members. 

In addition to archiving of the collected oral histories in Duke’s research repository, the team has made all project materials, including the oral histories, transcripts, documentaries and other informational videos, research and resources, podcast episodes, articles and event recordings available, with community consent, on a final public-facing website.