THE LAST DAY OF JUNE, 2008. JUST A FEW DAYS LATE, HARDLY A NANOSECOND IN DEEP TIME.

The Author had intended to write this post closer to June 30th, but, well, did not. Good thing, because he stumbled upon a few interesting articles that made the delay worth the letdown.

In 1973 singer-songwriter Al Stewart released the album “Past, Present, Future.” The album charted a new direction for Stewart as all of the songs on the album dealt with historical characters and historical events. Much of Stewart’s later work also addresses historical themes.

One of the songs on the album is "The Last Day of June 1934." A pivotal event occurred on and around that day. The event has since become known as the “Night of the Long Knives.”

In a thorough and brutal consolidation of power, Hitler murdered the leaders of the SA (“Brownshirts”) and obtained the tacit approval of these murders and purges from the German Army and the German political leadership.

Stewart’s song focuses on the events, including the murder of SA leader Ernst Rohm, and on the obliviousness of Europe to the event that launched the Nazis on their reign of butchery and terror.

The entire lyrics of the song are here. Some relevant words are set out below:

And a lost wind of summer blows into the streets
Past the tramps in the alleyways, the rich in silk sheets
And Europe lies sleeping,
you feel her heartbeats through the floor
On the last day of June 19...

On the night that Ernst Roehm died voices rang out
In the rolling Bavarian hills
And swept through the cities and danced in the gutters
Grown strong like the joining of wills

I sit here now by the banks of the Rhine
Dipping my feet in the cold stream of time
And I know I'm a dreamer, I know I'm out of line
With the people I see everywhere

The couples pass by me, they're looking so good
Their arms round each other, they head for the woods
They don't care who Ernst Roehm was, no reason they should
Just a shadow that hangs in the air

But I thought I saw him cross over the hill
With a whole ghostly army of men at his heel
And struck in the moment it seemed to be real like before
On the last day of June 1934

Oh to have been prescient on the last day of June 1934.

ON THE LAST DAY OF JUNE 1954.

Harrison Brown was an American geochemist and polymath involved in the isolation of plutonium for the first production of nuclear weapons. And he keenly understood the nature and the limitations of the future of humankind.

A post entitled “Which Future Should We Prepare for, Industrial or Agrarian” on the weblog Resource Insights contains a good discussion of Brown’s insight’s into the future of humankind.

In 1954 Brown published “The Challenge of Man’s Future”. In that book Brown outlined two futures of humans. One was the industrial future, the machine future, the future that we inhabit. The other future is an agrarian future, a far less comfortable future where life will be more troubled and tenuous.

Kurt Cobb of Resource Insights states:

Brown's views may seem strange to the modern ear accustomed as it is to hearing how thoroughly we have subdued nature through technology. But even back in 1954 it was already well-known in scientific circles that 1) we would one day run short of finite fossil fuels, 2) we were working our way from high-grade metal ores down to low-grade ores, and 3) industrial society would ultimately be faced with the task of obtaining its required metals and other basic resources from nothing more than air, rock and seawater. The key to making a successful transition, Brown reasoned, would be finding the necessary energy since if one has enough energy, getting needed materials from the ultra-low-grade resources of air, rock and seawater would be feasible.

GEORGE JETSON AND CHARLES DARWIN KNOW WHAT BROWN IS TALKING ABOUT.

Brown describes the problem this way:

Once a machine civilization has been in operation for some time, the lives of the people within the society become dependent upon the machines. The vast interlocking industrial network provides them with food, vaccines, antibiotics, and hospitals. If such a population should suddenly be deprived of a substantial fraction of its machines and forced to revert to an agrarian society, the resultant havoc would be enormous. Indeed, it is quite possible that a society within which there has been little natural selection based upon disease resistance for several generations, a society in which the people have come to depend increasingly upon surgery for repairs during early life and where there is little natural selection operating among women, relative to the ability to bear children--such a society could easily become extinct in a relatively short time following the disruption of the machine network.

AH, POST-APOCALYPSE AMERICA. THE ULTIMATE FRONTIER. THE ULTIMATE TEST FOR RUGGED INDIVIDUALISTS LIKE PHIL GRAMM AND RICHARD MELLON-SCAIFE.

Brown is basically saying that if the world goes Neanderthal, the world will need Neanderthals. Tiger Woods, Bill Gates, Rush Limbaugh and Arriana Huffington would likely be less successful in the neo-Agrarian world than Amazon hunter-gathers and homeless dudes that can live in boxes and scrounge meals from dumpsters.

Organisms evolve to succeed in the world that they are faced with. Polar bears need ice and seals. Venus Fly-Traps and Pitcher Plants need bogs. Prairies Chickens need prairies.

A hedge fund manager, with no hedge fun to manage and no penthouse to live in, has little ability to survive on the Pampas or the Polar ice shelf. Most or all of her kids would die of exposure or childhood disease.

SO MUCH LAND. SO FEW HORTICULTURISTS. SO LITTLE FOOD.

Modern agriculture has produced remarkably efficient organisms (corn, wheat, soybeans, livestock) that produce bumper harvests at relatively low input costs. That output comes at a perilous price. The organisms are breed for performance, not persistence. They grow fine in a narrow band of parameters. And as hybrids, they cannot even reproduce.

But throw a few exogenous events at these thoroughbreds and they fade and die. Drought, disease, blight, insects and inclement weather wreak havoc on these organisms. They lack the genetic diversity that their ancestors, wild counterparts, and garden varieties possess. Indian corn and heirloom vegetables are a couple of examples. Indian corn was grown for many thousands of years and in its long genetic life developed genes that allowed it to survive many threats. The same with heirloom vegetables. They retain a genetic diversity that makes them better equipped to survive in environments that would shred Pioneer’s finest seed corn.

THE LAST DAY OF JUNE 2034.

Brown’s thesis is not without a way out. The cheap but finite oil and coal that powered the machine age that he lived in must be replaced with something plentiful and cheap. And the raw materials that drove the machine age must be recycled.

Brown’s prescription was nuclear and/or solar power. Nuclear power never lived up to its “Atomic Age” promise due to the problems of waste storage and the potential for toxic release. It still has a place, and the time frame for new plant construction will fit in with the long-term transition to non-hydrocarbon power sources.

Solar power offers a better alternative. But it needs incentives to produce and to direct more capital toward development until it becomes an economically viable alternative source. Solar power WILL become a cheaper alternative to oil, coal and gas. But the question of WHEN is draped in uncertainty. That uncertainty could damn millions, perhaps billions.

Brown calls the switchover the “rate of conversion” problem:

Continuance of vigorous machine culture beyond another century or so is clearly dependent upon the development and utilization of atomic or solar power. If these sources of newly applied energy are to be available in time, the basic research and development must be pursued actively during the coming decades. And even if the knowledge is available soon enough, it is quite possible that the political and economic situation in the world at the time the new transition becomes necessary will be of such a nature that the transition will be effectively hindered. Time and again during the course of human history we have seen advance halted by unfavorable political and economic conditions. We have seen societies in which technical knowledge and resources were both present, but where adequate capital and organization were not in existence and could not be accumulated sufficiently rapidly. [Emphasis Added.]

We will have a better idea how the road to the last day of June 2134 will be traveled on the last day of June 2034. It can be a nice road traversed with efficiently powered vechicles or a dirt path trudged by hungry peasants.

There is one huge difference between the Last Day of June 1934 and the last day of June 2034. On the last day of June 2034 we will have some idea of what the future may hold.

THE LAST DAY OF JUNE, A DAY LIKE ANY OTHER DAY IN THE DESERT OF THE REAL!