Dan Rose – författare

The worldwide shift from coal to oil-based technology was devastating for many local communities. Energy Transition and the Local Community is the story of one such community: Hazleton, Pennsylvania. Hazleton''s economy, dependent solely on the mining of surrounding beds of anthracite coal, was destroyed by the changeover to oil. Yet Hazleton, when confronted with a catastrophic recession and a declining population, organized to attract new industry and eventually saw its local economy revitalized.Local communities are deeply affected whenever new forms of energy are exploited and older forms abandoned. Those communities, however, are almost uniformly ignored in ecological, environmental, and policy statements. Dan Rose, a specialist in the emerging science of human ecology, observes how energy-linked world economic fluctuations directly affect local economies. By merging theory with actual data from small communities, Rose is able to demonstrate how the decreasing availability of petroleum is pushing developed countries—exemplified by the community of Hazleton, Pennsylvania— into a new wave of recession.Hazleton, as an example, offers hope. Using this community''s experience to build a model, Rose defines both the vulnerability and the strength of local populations whose fortunes rest with the energy economy of the world. A working knowledge of this model will contribute to our understanding of human adaptation and help national and local leaders cope with an imminent energy changeover.

Dan Rose has explored the American status system for decades. His ethnographic research into black South Philadelphia, the business community of Hazleton Pennsylvania, and the large horse farms of Chester County Pennsylvania is drawn together here to examine the cultural forms that shape American life at every level.In Patterns of American Culture, Rose draws on the fact and metaphor of colonization to demonstrate that the central motive in the contemporary United States has been and continues to be the corporate form. He begins by considering our origins as a collection of colonies, each of which was constructed as a private corporation whose purpose was to make money for its investors by providing new goods and different markets for England. Rose contends that the structure underlying American life are still corporate and that their purpose is to create new resources, new products, new landscapes, new ideas, and new markets. Today, most Americans have multiple corporate memberships—in city and state governments, in the businesses that employ them, in professional organizations or unions, and in various civic and political associations. Further, through written rules and unwritten customs, these corporations determine who we are and what we can do.Patterns of American Culture is a scholarly and poetic pursuit of the concealed energies within this vast incorporation and an analysis of how it shapes society and the lives of individuals. Rose draws from poems by Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams and brings ideas from such sources as performance art and cultural theory to critique this pervasive institutional order. The book closes with a fable of life in a fictitious capitalist society that both comments on ethnographic practice and reveals the disturbing estrangement inherent in any study of this type of culture.This narrative ethnography will interest scholars and students of American studies, anthropology, English, folklore, and sociology, and members of the design professions, such as architecture, landscape, and urban design.