An Entrepreneur of the Social Sciences

Marine Lab Director Brings an Anthropologist's View and a Connection to the Sea to the Facilitation Table

By Monte Basgall

Social scientist Mike Orbach knows the math as well as he knows the environment, but he also knows a lot about the people who find their way into environmental controversies. These traits have made him a great facilitator, a man who can find ways to craft solutions. And they also lend themselves to his current job as director of the Duke Marine Laboratory.

A man whose commanding height and trademark handlebar moustache make him instantly recognizable, the coastal California native tries his best to stay close to the water despite his administrative duties. In fact, he sometimes rows from his home to the Marine Lab’s Pivers Island campus.

A computer screensaver in his office shows him surfing (safely, he insists) in storm waves during 2004’s Hurricane Frances. Lifelong experiences as a sailor bolster his advice on how to batten down the Marine Lab’s docks and buildings for the biggest blows.

And when Duke alumna Barbara Block brings her Stanford University research team to the area each winter to catch, tag and then release bluefin tuna for science, you may find him in the “fighting chair” reeling in one of the giant fishes.

Orbach first began teaching at the Marine Lab in 1985, recruited by the lab’s then-director John Costlow to start a marine policy program that initially ran just in the summer. Around that same time, Costlow convinced North Carolina Gov. Jim Martin to appoint Orbach to the Marine Fisheries Commission, a reorganized state policy making body that Costlow then chaired.

“I wanted an anthropologist,” the now retired biologist recalls in an interview. “And Mike performed very well.”

By then Orbach already had made a reputation, having been lured to East Carolina University in 1983 to help develop its marine social science program. As both head of ECU’s anthropology program and as a senior scientist at its Institute for Coastal and Marine Resources, he began carving out a legacy of helping solve environmental disputes.

While he was at ECU, federal fisheries officials and commercial fishermen in Florida invited him to help them with problems in the spiny lobster industry there. Orbach, an ECU colleague and a group of students spent a whole year on location studying everything from how the lobsters are caught to the dynamics of local politics.

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