Global Fellows Bring the World to the Marine Lab

Five-Week Summer Program Offers Students an International Perspective on Conservation

by Tim Lucas

As an expert on the conservation of threatened or endangered marine mammals, sea turtles and sea birds, Larry Crowder brings a world of experience to the classroom. But students enrolled in his Conservation Biology and Policy summer session class at the Duke University Marine Lab benefit not only from Crowder’s own experience in international conservation, but from the experiences of their fellow students as well.

That’s by design.

Crowder’s class, which he co-teaches with oceans and coastal policy expert Michael Orbach, is offered as part of the Nicholas School’s Integrated Marine Conservation Program. About 50 undergraduate and graduate students are accepted annually into the intensive, five-week program, which is held in Beaufort each July and August.

Built around a rigorous, five-day-a-week schedule of classwork, labs and field trips, the program is worth seven hours of academic credit. Its focus is on interdisciplinary problem-solving, using natural and social science theory to resolve real-world environmental problems.

Most of the students hail from Duke or other U.S. universities, but each year, between five and 15 students come from environmental hot spots outside the United States. Slightly older, on average, and more experienced than their American counterparts, these Global Fellows in Marine Conservation are graduate-level students who already are working in the field as conservationists. Many have helped form environmental NGOs in their home countries. They are on the front lines of efforts to protect threatened or endangered species and habitats in remote corners of the globe, often with limited resources.

The perspectives they bring, and the stories they share, “raise the level of our discussions and allow us to provide a truly international experience here in Beaufort,” says Crowder, the Stephen Toth Professor of Marine Biology.

“In many ways, the Global Fellows teach us,” Crowder says. “Despite our years of experience and the access we have to resources here in America, we are babes in the woods about how things get done in the rest of the world.”

The idea for launching the Global Fellows program occurred to Crowder during a heated classroom discussion on conservation theory during the first course in 1997. That year, 49 of the 50 students were American; the only international student was Lorna Innes, a government fisheries manager from Barbados.

“All of the American students and faculty were waxing philosophical about marine conservation, arguing about how it should be done,” Crowder recalls with a chuckle. “And then Lorna stood up and said, ‘Let me tell you how it is in Barbados.’ And we all shut up and listened and learned.”

The following year, Crowder secured funding from the Lumpkin Family Foundation to underwrite the costs for five students from Brazil, Israel, Lithuania, Georgia and Malawi—the inaugural class of Global Fellows—to take part in the Integrated Marine Conservation Program.

Since then, the Fellows program also has received funding from the Oak Foundation, the Edith Munson Foundation, the Julian Price Family Foundation, the Panaphil Foundation, the Educational Foundation of America, the Mex-American Cultural Foundation, the Duke Marine Lab, and Sybil, David and Noah Bogardus.

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