(Continued from Part 1,)
Fifth, I believe that people are the most valuable creation on the planet for religious and practical reasons. The more people we have, the more knowledge they generate and can apply. I believe the growth of knowledge, personal freedom, and rule of law are the significant causes of mankind rising out of historical poverty. Great books like The Ultimate Resource 2, by Julian Simon, and Superabundance, by Gale Pooley and Marian L. Tupy, hammer home the fact that increased populations have increased prosperity. This is very counter to conventional wisdom because Malthusian thinking has warped much of our culture, including prepper culture.
An example of this is how we often talk about how much things cost in the past versus today. A candy bar was a nickel but today it costs a dollar. A better way to compare this is to look at how much time we have to spend to earn that candy bar. When the candy bar was five cents the hour wage was thirty five cents an hour allowing our ancestors to buy 7 candy bars for an hour of their time. Today, the average hourly wage is about thirty one dollars an hour so for the same hour of time we can have 31 candy bars. Our time gets us more than past generations and our time is freer to spend as we wish. This is the increasing prosperity I am talking about. I recommend reading or listening to the books above to understand more about this line of thought and to combat some very anti-human assumptions in our culture.
In the prepper world, there is a heavy focus on how dangerous people can be — especially during a disaster where hunger, desperation, and LWTROL have set in. The risks that people can present should always be remembered and planned for, but we also need to view people as valuable assets that could be empowered to help prevent a disaster from becoming a tragedy. Think of almost every good versus evil story we have every read, listen to, or watched. Do the bad guys and gals want more or less people to work for them? It is always more. Do tyrants want to keep or free their slaves? Do they want a larger or smaller conscripted army? Always more. The greater the human population they control the greater their power because humans can do powerful things. Growing food, making things, fixing things, fighting, thinking, defending and much more.
Now think of the typical prepper strategies to survive SHTF. Build a group of trusted family and friends but don’t let it get too large. Work with this small trusted group to ride out the emergency and defend against “others”. Only after the smoke clears should we venture out and re-contact the world around us. How much of our preparations are focused on repelling invaders verse making early allies? 80% versus 20% or a worse ratio? Think of it like the diplomatic term of guns and butter to interact with the worlds other nations. Are we putting enough butter diplomacy into our planning and preparations? Where is our desire to grow our group right after a disaster strikes? Not for power but as a bulwark to preserve our individual freedoms and to blunt the disaster’s impacts on our communities. I personally would much rather be part of a larger community that is united in fighting for survival than a community that has splintered and is fighting each other. There is a tiny window before hunger sets in and desperation starts driving people. My strategy, in many Type 2 Emergencies (T2Es), would be to quickly use this short initial time window to harness the power of our communities; to win the race against life-threatening starvation.
Finally, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Savior of all mankind and the greatest leader and example the world will ever know. He invites all of us to live the two Great Commandments: To love God and love our neighbors as ourselves. I want to be a neighbor like the Good Samaritan. Imagine we come across a battered and bleeding person on a lonely road. Are his attackers still nearby? Should we get involved? The Good Samaritan had the courage to love his neighbor in spite of the risks when others just walked past. I like a statement I saved from Dennis Prager, “My purpose in life is to live fully and not to live forever.” For me, doing my best to live the 2nd great commandment is a key part of living fully.
I believe in the potential for goodness and greatness in our neighbors if they are encouraged with good examples to look heavenward. Ezra Taft Benson who was an LDS religious leader, a US Secretary of Agriculture, and an outspoken advocate for the US Constitution once said it this way. “The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of the slums. Christ takes the slums out of people, and then they take themselves out of the slums. The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature. … Yes, Christ changes men, and changed men can change the world.”
I also love the lesson from one of the times Christ fed the multitudes. In this event the apostles were ask to go and find food for the multitude in the gathered crowds. A lad willingly give his loaves and fishes to Jesus. We don’t know if others also brought food, but if they did they didn’t share or were not asked. This lad was prepared, he was like us, prepared. But this day he trusted in God and likely expected to go hungry as his bread and fishes were shared with so many. The scriptures then record the miracle that came from this sacrifice (John 6:5-14). Christ bless his small offering and multiple it enough to feed everyone and still have leftovers.
I am not suggesting that our food storage should be counted on to miraculously expand to feed our town for months if we share it during an emergency. I am suggesting that we should exercise faith and charity during a disaster and wisely “give ’til it hurts” as James Wesley, Rawles has often encouraged and trust that God is aware of us.
We should not discount the impact for good we can make if we allow ourselves to be instruments in the hands of the Lord. Below, I will make the case that using our skills and some resources could become a positive tipping point to invite modern-day miracles if such dangers show up in our lifetimes.
I will recap my strategy, the what, before I lay out the tactics, the how. The strategy: Prepare to swiftly help many of the good but unprepared people in our circles of influence to avoid starvation by cooperatively rebuilding a community wide calorie surplus in the aftermath of a T2E. Now onto the tactics…
2 – Large Scale Cambium Harvesting
The first tactic is to tap into a large hidden calorie source, in some areas, at the start of a T2E. 1st Tactic: In the first few days of the emergency, if it is a large enough natural resource in our area, start a large-scale tree bark (cambium) harvesting program to create a calorie bridge to future food production. Tree bark, or more specifically the phloem/cambium layer in the vast majority of trees in North America is edible. Yes, you read that right, I am recommending we eat tree bark on a massive scale as an emergency food source. Please pick your jaw up off the floor and let’s consider the history of this food source. The Adirondack Mountains is named after the Algonquian people and the name means “they who eat trees” or “bark eaters”.
The cambium layer in trees was part of the Algonquian people’s — and other ancient people’s — diet especially in hard times. It was mainly dried and turned into a flour for breads and porridges. In Scandinavian countries the cambium layer in pine trees was also used to make flour and was mixed with other grains to make Pettuleipä, a tradition bread. Tree bark is not a go to calorie source under any normal circumstances but it does have a good historical record as an emergency food and should be seriously considered to prevent starvation in our communities. If tree bark is an abundant calorie resource in our community it should be considered in our preparedness strategy just like traditional crops and livestock in our area should be.
If we lived in the Corn Belt and a massive solar CME wiped out the grid two weeks from harvest, wouldn’t this impact our preparedness strategy? If there were enough calories in the field to feed our community for months, would we just hunker down and guard our group and our preps or would we work to help start-up a community wide effort to bring in a harvest that would prevent starvation, desperation, and LWTROL? In some areas and situations calories from trees could be a significantly large resource.
2.1 The Anatomy Of A Tree
Let’s look at how a tree is put together. The first layer is the outer tree bark or sometimes called the cork layer. This is not edible. Just under this is the prize we are looking for, the phloem and cambium layers. The phloem is right next to the outer bark and the next layer is the cambium which is a very thin layer containing the newest tree growth. To avoid calling this the phloem/cambium layer I will just call it the cambium layer for simplicity and because most references just call these two layers cambium. This seem strange to me because the phloem is the significantly thicker layer but who am I to change tradition? These combined layers are a spongey flexible layer that contains sugar and starch calories and other nutrients like vitamin C. It is soft enough we can easily dent it with our fingernail. It will also be a very different color than the outer bark. Its thickness can range from 0.012 to 0.55 inches. This layer transports nutrients up and down the tree.
The next layer is called the sapwood. It is significantly harder to cut through and it feels like wood if cut. It would be much more difficult to dent with our fingernail. It will be similar in color to the phloem layer but as mentioned before it has a very different mechanical feel. There are other inner layers but they don’t matter to this discussion. I will go over how to harvest the cambium layer later in this article. This introduction is just to give a basic understanding of where the edible tree bark is found in trees. Now onto some number crunching to evaluate how much of an impact tree cambium could make during an emergency.
2.2 – USA Cambium Resources
There are an estimated 280 billion trees in the US. If we take out the 32 billion in Alaska we still have 248 billion. If we assume that 60% of these trees have an edible cambium layer, an average diameter of 10 inches and on average are 25 feet tall this would be 149 billion trees we could use to feed people just from the bark. I will also only use only the average trunk dimensions for the cambium layer volume. There is also edible cambium in the branches which will be excluded to be conservative in my calculations but in an actual emergency should be used. Using multiple sources tree cambium seems to conservatively average 500 kcal/lb. (1 kcal is what food packaging just calls 1 Calorie).
For comparison, rice has 1,648 kcal/lb, and wheat has 1,538 kcal/lb so tree cambium is significantly lower but much better than starving. Further, I will assume the average cambium layer is 1/16 of an inch thick. I have validated this as a conservative number from online data sources and from multiple physical samples of the cambium layer from thicker branches on my silver maple tree. The final assumption in my calculations uses a cambium layer density of 0.01626 lb/in^3. All these assumptions would give us 4.8 pounds of cambium and 2,385 kcal per average tree. The US population in 2023 was 335 million people. If we assume an average the daily calorie needs combining men, women, and children we can use of 1,800 kcal/day. With all 149 billion trees we could feed the US population for just about 1.6 years. This would be Dr. Seuss’s Lorax levels of tree destruction but unless something really, really, bad happens to us we won’t need to rely on tree bark for our only food source for 1.6 years.
My recommendation is to use this food source just as a calorie bridge, for 3-8 months at most, to prevent starvation in small to medium-sized communities to reach food sources in the next growing season. This scaled-down approach would also allow for just scaring or delimbing trees and not chopping them down unless they were needed for wood in tree-rich areas.
One final estimate: How many trees can a group of people cut down and process in a day. I estimated a physically fit person with hand tools could cut down three 10” diameter trees per day and harvest the cambium. This assumes the efficiency gains from working as a group but it could be even better than this if some power tools were available. This would be each person harvesting 7,155 kcal/day or enough calories for 4 average Americans per day or 3 extra people excluding the harvester.
With enough people thrown at this problem this is a path to calorie surplus to close a short-term hunger gap. That means if our area has sufficient trees, 29 adults working 6 days a week could feed a group of 100 men, women, and children, 522 trees per week. In the US there are about 3.5 adults for every child or 78% of the population are adults. So there would be 49 other adults in this group free to work on other survival tasks.
Next, I will compare cambium harvesting to the average American worker today. The average American worker makes $65,000/yr or $250/day and after taxes let’s call it $200/day. I recently bought a 25 lb bag of rice for about $0.60/lb of rice so the average worker could get 333 lbs. of rice per work day or about 549,000 kcal/day. This could feed 304 average group of men, women, and children per day excluding the worker or just the work for about 7 months. This math is why right now is the best time to prepare for tomorrow.
Let’s do one more comparison. We will consider how much land one person could grow and harvest food crops by hand with no modern powered methods. I assume a single trained person could farm 4 acres by hand. Let’s also assume they can produce 3 million kcal/acre. If they worked 7 months per year and 4 days per week, this would be 112 days per year. The land would yield 12 million kcal for 112 days work. This is 107,000 kcal/ work day. This a 513% fewer calories per day than the modern average but is still 1,496% higher than just harvesting tree cambium.
Any plan that can create a calorie surplus is a true win in a disaster situation but we should always move our time and energy to producing the highest amount of calories possible with the resource available. This comparison highlights why our ancient ancestors switched from hunting and gathering to agriculture, more food for less time and effort.
Our first tree resource assessment step would be to determine how many trees we have in our local area. Use Google Maps or some other mapping program with satellite imagery to estimate how many trees are within 20 to 30 miles of our home, a moderate biking distance. Make a physical square and count the trees in that square. Then use that square to estimate the trees in similarly tree-covered land. Multiply the trees/square by the number of squares and we now have a good total count estimate. Next, drive to one of these spots and physically count the starting square as a double check. Correct the total tree count, as needed. The next step is to estimate how many people also live in this area. Then we put all our info together and estimate how long this resource could feed our community. Here are two examples:
Tree Resource Example 1:
If we have 20,000 trees in the 30 mile radius around us and 1,000 people also live there and 60% of the trees have edible cambium and are the right size that is 12,000 trees to harvest. That is 28.6 million kcal or enough to feed this group of 1000 people for 15.9 days, 1,800 kcal/day assumption. Stop here. This area does not have enough cambium to act as a calorie bridge. Don’t start a community-wide effort to feed people. We need to find a better plan for our family and friends to survive a T2E.
Tree Resource Example 2:
If we have 2,000,000 trees in the 30 mile radius around us (this is only ~5 trees/acre and forest land has 100 to 800 trees per acre) and 1000 people also live there and 60% of the trees have edible cambium and are large enough that is 1,200,000 trees to harvest. That is 2.862 billion kcal or enough to feed this group of 1000 people for 1590 days or 4.35 years, 1,800 kcal/day assumption. Continue exploring this. A very strong calorie bridge can be built to reach calories by growing local crops.
(To be continued tomorrow, in Part 3.)
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