Conifer pitch is truly amazing stuff. If you're lucky enough to find yourself in an area that has lots of balsam fir trees, not only will you have an excellent substitute for neosporin anti-biotic creme: you will also have an excellent way of lighting emergency fires ... a method which is going to create life saving fires even during the course of a raging downpour ! The main problem is that you aren't a botanist and neither am I. If you happen to be a "generalist" (like I am) and you gather information about a wide variety of different subjects, you can easily lose sight of fine distinctions that only a "specialist" would be cognizant of. The end result is that you have a serious gap in your knowledge, and this can easily spell disaster for you when the chips are down. OK, so you're stuck out in the middle of nowhere and you see lots of trees all over the place. They appear to be conifers of some kind, but exactly what kind of conifers are they ? Are they pines or spruce or what ? The balsam fir is almost identical to the spruce or the pine, so how are you going to know which tree is a balsam fir and which tree is something else ? How are you going to gather the all-important pitch, and once you harvest the pitch, what are you going to do with it ? If you know that it's a pine tree that you're looking at, you know that you can make a life-saving tea out of the needles. But let's assume for a moment that you're stuck in a place that has tons of douglas fir trees. Then what ? Can you obtain sustenance from them ? Can you eat the inner bark ? Is the wood going to make a good campfire ? etc. etc. LW.