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In Memoriam E ugene A. Rosa, a pioneer in environmental sociology, died on February 21, 2013, at seventy-one. Gene was committed to linking the leading edge of the social sciences to the ecological and earth systems sciences, as well as to engineering. His work is truly interdisciplinary and is influential among scholars who span the social, ecological, and physical sciences. At the same time, his work is foundational to contemporary thinking in structural human ecology, the sociology of risk, and the sociology of energy. Gene began his sociological career with his graduate work at the prestigious Maxwell School at Syracuse University, where he studied with Allan Mazur. Gene’s dissertation work was in what he termed “biosociology” to emphasize that he was studying the influence of the social on the biological, in contrast to the genetic reductionism of sociobiology. This work presaged the current interest in neurosociology. Allan and Gene published one of the first articles to demonstrate that energy consumption was decoupled from the quality of life in industrial economies. It may be the first macro-comparative analysis in environmental social science. It spawned further analysis and started to shift our understanding of energy consumption in contemporary societies. Gene continued to publish extensively on energy, which led to three other major themes in his work: nuclear power, risk, and structural human ecology. After completing graduate school and a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University, Gene moved to Washington State University. At the time, the Department of Sociology had an amazing cluster of scholars working on the environment and closely related issues: Bill Catton, Riley Dunlap, Lee Freese, Bill Freudenburg, and Jim Short. Gene thrived in this environment and collaborated viii In Memoriam regularly with these colleagues, particularly on topics in nuclear power and risk. Nuclear power has been a contentious issue since the 1970s, and Gene and his colleagues were pioneers in developing a sociology of nuclear power through a series of influential articles and edited books. Recently, Gene led a distinguished collaboration of scholars who raised the importance of social science perspectives in assessing the nuclear waste issue. As a result, he was asked to testify before President Barack Obama’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future. Although his health prevented him from testifying, other colleagues from the team he led did. As a result, the commission’s reports were much more attentive to social science than otherwise would have been the case. Gene’s interest in nuclear power led naturally to his foundational work in the sociology of risk, where he made immense and wide-ranging contributions. His cross-cultural comparisons of risk perceptions have been cited as an exemplar of comparative research methods, and his U.S.-based work on risk perceptions has been highly influential in both scholarship and policy. He made perhaps his most important contributions to the sociology of risk by engaging our basic conceptualizations of risk and risk policy. His famous article on the ontology and epistemology of risk, “Metatheoretical Foundations of Post-Normal Risk,” continues to spark discussion. One of his monographs, Risk, Uncertainty, and Rational Action, won the 2000–2002 Outstanding Publication Award from the Section on Environment and Technology of the American Sociological Association. This, his last book, engages current thinking on societal risk and offers both theoretical advances and suggestions about risk governance, while one of his last papers lays out a logic for broad comparisons of some the most important risks facing society, including climate change and terrorism. One of his major accomplishments in the field of risk research was to link the work on social theory of risk championed by Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Niklas Luhmann to the risk management and governance community. He wanted risk theory to become practical for improving risk management and fostering sustainability . This interdisciplinary outreach has been a major stimulus for building bridges between the often very abstract risk theory camp in sociology and the more practical organizational- or governance-oriented studies of applied risk sociology. Overall, Gene published more than forty articles and book chapters on various aspects of risk, and this summary necessarily touches only a few of the themes he engaged. For the past two decades, Gene has been a leader of a research program in structural human ecology, an effort intended to bridge the social and ecological sciences in the analysis of human drivers of environmental change. With his collaborators Richard York and Tom Dietz, Gene established an analytical logic that evaluated...

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