(Continued from Part 3.)
2.5 – Options For Using Local Cambium Resources
If we have prepared beforehand to harvest tree cambium and a Type 2 Emergency (T2E) happens, we will have three main choices to consider in my view. I encourage you to make this decision prayerfully and with your group’s best judgment. Every choice in a disaster is a set of trade-offs with no perfect solutions. If we actively try and help our neighbors early there is no doubt that this will reduce early suffering for some and could lead to ongoing beneficial cooperation. If more people are pulling together to produce valuable resources there will be less community desperation and there is the possibility to create a large calorie bridge to reach the next growing seasons calories. We might also create bonds of loyalty and trust with more people making it easier to rebuild after the disaster.
There are also some major risks. They include potentially exposing our groups as a resource target, if more people survive than the brutal math is that a community’s limited resources will not last as long, and if the cambium harvesting operation is not sufficient to create a calorie bridge, the process will fall apart leaving resentment and maybe even new personal enemies. We could lose our heads because we stuck our necks out as the saying goes. Our family members could be exposed to violence, starvation, or worse because we decided to publicly cooperate with our neighbors after an emergency. Please consider the risks and rewards.
2.51 – Option 1: T2E – Help From The Shadows
The first choice to consider would be to use this knowledge to add to our group’s emergency calories as needed but don’t make direct contact with the broader community to set up a harvesting group. We could still anonymously share this information if we have preprinted info packs on cambium harvesting and other survival knowledge. Others would then have a chance at improved outcomes with very little risk to our groups. This could be done if our groups bug-in or bug-out. There are some cases where this is the best choice depending on personal circumstances and the type of emergency. The pros of this option is that we reduce the risk of others learning about our preparations and the problems that could come from that. The main downside is that our groups then leave the fate of our community members to their own preparations and the influence predators in the community. Even if we give anonymous additional charity, desperation in the community will happen faster than if we personally intervened early in the emergency. I will now list the circumstances where I think this approach would clearly be the best choice to make.
Here are the type two emergencies (T2Es) where I don’t recommend applying a community-wide cambium harvesting effort. First, would be an active life-threatening pandemic. If interacting with unknown people could cause us to catch a deadly disease, the reward is not worth the risk. Second, if we have nuclear fallout in our area. This is not the time to start a community-wide calorie gathering effort. This is a time to hunker down behind physical barriers that block harmful radiation. Third, would be if we were physically in the middle of an active civil war zone. Again, my strategy would be too risky in this event. Fourth, if we live in a large population area. My tactics only stand a chance of working if the local population is small enough. I would draw a line in the sand at a city size of 50,000 people max and that city is the biggest one within at least a couple hour drive. Even this might be too large but I am an optimist. Fifth, if we don’t live close enough to a sufficient source of edible trees. The early calorie bridge idea relies on having enough calories within a reasonable walking or biking distance. If this is not true, then it should not be tried without relocation. Sixth, if a T2E has already been going on long enough that starvation, desperation, and LWTROL have strongly set-in to the area. None of my tactics can put this evil genii back in the bottle. At this point it would be like trying to save a drowning person while next to them in the water. They are more likely to drown both of us than we are to save them. My best guess is that sometime after the first or second week is the deadline to try my strategy. I have likely missed some other specific events but this list gives the general idea of when not to try my plan. For most other T2Es I think cambium harvesting, if applied in the right time window, can become a community calorie bridge.
There are also some circumstances where I would not recommend using my strategy. If we have a very small group and/or we have very few community connections then don’t try my whole approach. The success of this effort will require having at least some pre-existing network of people who we can afford to reach out to and still maintain some level of security as well as handling other survival needs. Another no-go would be if our tree resources are marginal and the timing of the emergency puts the next growing season too far away. For example, if the emergency strikes in October and the next growing season is April. Including the time for crops to grow this is about a 9-month gap before calories show up. This might be a bridge too far. Another issue could be if our group has limited food storage with no room to share or to have some losses. My strategy has a significant risk of people discovering we have resources and the strategy would work best if the extended groups we support are backed up with some of these resources if needs arise.
Another no-go would be if we don’t live in an area with abundant water resources after the T2E. If we don’t have abundant local water resources don’t bug-in. Just finding drinking water in an area like this will be a very competitive activity that will increase in risk over time. Also if we don’t have abundant water in our area there is no point to harvesting cambium as a group to create a calorie bridge because that bridge will never lead to a surplus of calories by growing food locally. We don’t have the water to successfully grow lots of crops. We will have to relocate to an area with sufficient water to survive.
Another issue would be if the weather is dangerously cold in our area when the T2E happens. This would severely limit the hours of work a group could put in to harvest cambium and the workers would burn a lot more calories and risk cold-weather illnesses. Consider this issue carefully before you try my suggestions in a very cold areas. There are likely other circumstances that could be no-gos but this list is sufficient to get you thinking about your specific situations and find situations I have overlooked.
One final thought on option 1. If you live at your retreat location in a low-population area it might take significant resources to reach out to your neighbors during a T2E. If this is the case then keep your low profile and do your best to ride out the storms that will come. Only consider other options if you fell inspired to do so. For those like myself and others who live closer to our neighbors, we will likely face more interactions whether we like it or not. The next options are not as safe as being in the best locations but they are proactive and could have better outcomes than just being reactive.
My family recently had an opportunity to leave a larger city in California and move to a smaller city in a different state with much better water resources, and we took it. It was a significant improvement as a location to face an emergency but it still has trade-offs. I try my best to view my family’s self-reliance as a journey and not a destination, things could always be better but we should take time to feel grateful along the way for our blessings. Don’t be too hard on yourself if you are not prepared as well as you would like to be now. Work hard, work smart and do your best to make small regular improvements and your efforts will become a refuge for your family and friends if the storms show up.
2.52 – Option 2: T2E – Help As A Leader/Educator Hiding In The Crowd
The second choice to consider would be to use this knowledge to set up a community/neighborhood group of natural resource foragers for cambium and other food sources, but we make these efforts behind the scenes as just another member of the crowd. Our group would participate in the harvesting efforts but not openly as this efforts’ leaders. This will have more risks than the first option but it could also have a larger upside if successful.
Instead of reaching out to our neighbors to suggest a foraging group and stamp PREPPER in bright red letters on our foreheads, I will suggest two more subtle and natural group efforts to start with. I will call these the pre-tactics for my strategy. Pre-Tactics: Experiment with early, natural and lower risk neighborhood/community cooperative efforts after an emergency to learn if cooperation can be successful. First, we could suggest how to wisely use refrigerated foods if the T2E causes a loss of power. Second, would be starting a group effort to gather water. Both would be lower-risk efforts to learn how the people around us could pull together in an emergency.
If grid power is lost in a T2E, then a lot of calories are going to spoil in the first 6-48 hours if the temperature is warmer than 38 F for the refrigerator and 0 F for the freezer. If we live in a cold weather area and it is the cold season then we just need to encourage our neighbors to use this natural cooling to keep food from spoiling by taking it outside or by making ice outside and adding it to our refrigerator. If this is not the case, then consider the following. We can reach out to our neighbors and suggest that everyone have a block cookout and feast on the food before it spoils. Grill the meat, eat the ice cream, and scramble the eggs. This will store some of the calories in our bodies and indirectly prevent people from eating preserved calories like canned foods too early in an emergency. It will also help prevent early food poisoning by waiting too long to eat our refrigerated food.
We could even suggest smoking some meat to make jerky on the neighborhood grills. Even regular BBQ grills can be used as emergency smokers. If it is a propane grill put some smoker wood chips in a foil pack and put this on the grate with the meat. If it is a charcoal grill just add smoking wood chips into the charcoal after it is started. Thinly slice up the meat, season, and cook at 150-200 F for 2-6 hrs. This is a low tech way to save early calories. Also, since most Americans have a BBQ grill we will likely only stand out as a jerky lovers and not as preppers. There are better ways like canning but these supplies might not be around and if we bring out boxes of canning supplies for the neighborhood we will defeat the purpose of option 2, limit draw attention to ourselves.
For those of us like myself who do not have our own water wells I recommend starting a grassroots group project to collect water. In my case I have personal water storage for about a month which is not long enough for a T2E. My family is currently blessed to have a river and a lake within walking distance. I have plenty of ways to purify water but we will have to venture out to collect it. Everyone else around me will have the same challenge and likely won’t have a large supply stored up. If I reach out to some neighbors early on in a crisis while everyday trust is still part of baseline thinking, it would be very natural to focus as a group on our water needs.
Starting this would have a few early benefits. One, it would cause people to assume that we are running out of water at the same rate they are and not get curious after 2 or 3 weeks, why their neighbor hasn’t gone to the river to get some water. Two, it will be easier to make new connections before the realities and dangers of our new circumstances start setting in and people start avoiding strangers. Three, if we have abundant water resources in our area, gathering it will be a low competition activity because the supply will greatly exceed the demand.
Here is how I would approach Option 2 for water gathering. I will reach out to a few neighbors to find those who want to start a group water collection effort. I would encourage a member of this group to take the lead on this effort while letting them know I am willing to support them 100%. I would also offer to “try and find” my backpacking water filter for the effort. This would get the job done without causing me to stand out too much. This effort would be a chance to see how people work together and to learn if there is an opportunity to work together on other projects like cambium harvesting or starting a neighborhood defense.
If the water collection efforts went well, we should consider recruiting a group of natural resource foragers. Here is a way to do this in secret. Pre-print packets of information on foraging in our area as wells as some basic survival information. Place these packets in a few obvious locations with eye-catching signs that will be spotted by neighbors, maybe in the middle of a street or at some other visible neighborhood spot. The packets would have the invitation to start a foraging group to create a calorie bridge with detailed plans of where, when, how, and why and other invitations like starting a neighborhood watch group on steroids and starting to grow crops when the season is right. The packet could even say it was a gift to the community from a group that had bugged out but wanted to leave help behind.
At this point, I could feign ignorance and see what the neighborhood response was to these anonymous invitations. If it is well supported, I could join in the efforts with the rest of the group. The group will need to handle how the calories are be distributed and who will do which tasks. The basic outline of tasks and needed equipment should be in the packets.
I will recap the pros and cons of option 2. The pros of reaching out to help our community in a subtle way could include creating a group directly around us that is not starving, has less desperation, has a chance to building a calorie surplus, a stronger shared defense, the happiness that comes from helping others, and a stronger foundation for rebuilding. The cons are that we become more visible to others and they might learn or suspect what resources we have, we could become a target of manipulation, theft and or violence if others want our resources, the projects we help start might fail and leave others resentful of those involved, and our group efforts could be exploited by corrupt leadership and/or criminal elements around us. Consider all of these factors as you decide what trade-offs are best for you.
2.53 – Option 3: T2E – Full Effort To Help Those That Can Be Helped
The third choice to consider would be to use this knowledge openly to set up a community/neighborhood group of natural resource foragers for cambium and other food sources as a calorie bridge. In parallel with this also lead the group to grow enough food to re-establish a calorie surplus in our area and band together for a community-wide defense and medical needs. With this all-in approach, use all the resources and skills our group can spare to help this and other community efforts to succeed. This will have the most risks but it could also have the largest upside if successful.
I would again recommend starting with eating and storing refrigerated food and with water collection as the initial group projects. We should be bold and prudent in our approach depending on our current relationships with our neighbors. If we already have good friendships move faster and move slower if we are struggling with initial projects.
For the refrigerator group project consider all of the approaches listed in Option 2 and add to it. If we have canning materials beyond what we need for our food, put them to work in the neighborhood capturing calories before they spoil. Find out if others have canning supplies and put those to work too. Can meats/fruit/et cetera, and even dehydrate food if we have one and can power it. Ask our neighbors to return our canning supplies once they eat their newly preserved food.
If some in the neighborhood have RVs, they will have absorption refrigerators that are powered by propane. Make a deal with them to store high-calorie but hard-to-preserve food sources and to refrigerated essential neighborhood medicines that can’t be preserved without cooling. One other low-tech method that could be used to preserve calories for a few extra days would be to build a few zeer pots. These would be a good option if the daytime temperatures are below 80 F and if the humidity is not too high in our area. A zeer pot is an outer unglazed clay pot with a layer of wet sand inside and finally an unglazed inner clay pot with a lid. Double-wall cardboard boxes could be used instead of pots if need be, because this would not be a long-term tool, just an emergency method to buy a few extra days. Next, place the zeer pots in a shaded and breezy area. This can drop the inner pot temperature about 40 degrees F below the surrounding temperature. Here are two good links on how to build one: Zeer Pot Link 1 and Zeer Pot Link 2.
The most significant challenge to starting a large food preserving/using effort will be convincing our neighbors to make this level of effort early into a T2E; normalcy bias is powerful. Some might be thinking the lights will soon come back on and they can just trash the spoiled food and refill their fridge at the store later that week. My recommendation is to educate them if the right type of emergency signs are there. The signs of an EMP or solar flare would be power loss plus the loss of electronics like smartphones and failed vehicles in the neighborhood and on the roadways. If a wide-scale cyberattacks or physical attacks have disrupted the grid it will be harder to spot this versus a normal outage initially but there might be communications for a while due to battery backup systems and this attack could be reported in the local news, radio, or as emergency messages on our phones.
If power and communications are both lost at the same time then this would also be a sign that something more serious as happened. We could also make the case that it might be a false alarm but trying this would be good practice for a more serious emergency and can help save them money instead of letting all of their food spoil. Capturing these calories before they are lost will add days of extra resources to our neighborhoods and will build trust for the work to come.
As soon as the water stops running we can reach out our neighbors to set up a collection and purification process for our neighborhood. With this option, don’t hold back. Water purification methods are currently very inexpensive to buy. I am a fan of the mini Sawyer for backpacking. It currently costs about twenty dollars to filter up to 100,000 gallons of water. Even if we cut that volume in half the cost is still only 0.0004 cents per gallon or 0.40 cents for a 1000 gallons. Stock up now on some low-cost water purification equipment that could be used to help our neighbors, as back-ups for our gear, or for barter. Another thing to offer our neighbors is knowledge on how to store extra water in their homes. Break water storage into two buckets, drinking and non-potable for sanitation/washing needs. Remind them of the extra drinking water they have in their hot water tanks and show them how to access it from the drain valve. For drinking water, encourage them start saving food grade juice and soda bottles. Once the containers are cleaned out, fill them with purified water and add 6 drops of plain laundry bleach per gallon for storage.
For non-potable water encourage the use of empty plastic chemical containers like laundry soap, bleach, etc. I am a fan of the laundry soap containers with the dispenser valves. They make great camping or emergency hand-washing containers. Also gather up buckets and containers with lids for collecting water and bringing it back to homes. Make sure these containers are marked as non-potable to reduce the risks of people drinking non-purified water. For moving water around find the most efficient methods our neighborhood has to save time and energy. Consider bikes with trailers, holding a heavy container full of water balanced on a bike seat while walking the bike, wheelbarrows, hand trucks, etc. If we have a wheelbarrow we should consider getting or making something like a set of SteadyLifter wheelbarrow assist straps. If we start doing a lot of wheelbarrow work, like a water hauling project, these straps are a great energy savers and our forearms will thank us.
With the water project started, our expanding group is ready to move on to foraging. Pre-print packets on foraging in our area and some basic survival information. Have a few foraging plans printed out that will include where, what, when and how. Remember to have site security when your group is out foraging. Bring extra foraging packets when foraging. If we are approached by non-threatening people, then do as the ancient proverb says and “teach them to fish.” Give them a foraging packet, a small sample of cambium flour and show them how to collect cambium and other food sources in our area. This will act as a safety valve for people who are starting to struggle with getting enough calories. This will give them a lower risk way of finding food without resorting to looting or stealing.
If we run into criminals we can’t defend against, then the print-outs may help reduce the risk to ourselves and others too. If they learn that there are food sources they had not considered but they take a lot of labor to collect they might start viewing people differently. This could lead to a path of captivity for people instead of just robbery and murder. Granted, neither of these are great options. But if self-defense ever fails and I am forced to choose between death and captivity with a future chance for escape or rebellion, then I would pick the second option for myself and others.
Other important community efforts to start early will be mutual defense, medical needs, hygiene, communications, heating, cooling, and more. I won’t speak to these topics in this article other than to remind us they should be properly planned. I will cover how to go beyond foraging and start growing emergency food locally. That is my next topic.
(To be continued tomorrow, in Part 5.)
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