(Zero Hedge)—The announcement in April that genetic company Colossal Biosciences has successfully created a litter of previously extinct “Dire Wolf” puppies using revolutionary genetic editing technology sent shockwaves through the media.
Now the company is back in the spotlight with film director and investor Peter Jackson (Lord Of The Rings); this time promoting a new effort to bring back the Moa Bird, a truly giant 12 foot flightless bird that roamed the island of New Zealand until it was hunted to extinction by Maori settlers 600 years ago.
Jackson says the project to de-extinct the moa is a dream more important than any work he has done in movies. He has joined a number of international investors and celebrity investors including George R.R. Martin, Tom Brady, Tiger Woods, and Paris Hilton to make the next Colossal experiment possible.
The reintroduction of the moa would be a step above the return of the dire wolves – DNA testing shows that the much smaller South American tinamou bird is the moa’s closest living relative, not a more obvious species like the kiwi or emu. To go from a 17 inch tall tinamou to a 12 foot behemoth like the moa would be an impressive success.
Geneticists are still quibbling to this day over the dire wolf project and whether or not the wolves represent true dire wolves or mere facsimiles. Colossal is the first organization to use new CRISPR tech (short for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”) to edit DNA with precision and create a new animal from an existing genetic cousin (the grey wolf). The method circumvents traditional cloning and it leaves scientists questioning how to categorize animals born through the process.
Some critics question the ethics of reintroducing lost species. However, there is also a large contingent of scientists and journalists within elitist circles that are clearly indignant over Colossal’s “tech bro” background. In other words, they doth protest too much and it may be because they don’t think people outside of their academic clubs should be allowed to break new scientific ground.
The animosity is similar to that shown by critics of Elon Musk’s Space X (like leftist astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson). Regardless of how one feels about Musk politically, it is a fact that he has advanced rocket technology far beyond anything NASA has done in decades and for less money. Yet, traditional government funded scientific groups dismiss Space X’s work as “negligible”, revealing their ego and deep bias.
Is genetic editing a false form of de-extinction when compared to cloning? Could cloning ever actually be used to successfully bring back extinct animals like the moa? Only time will tell. Professional egos need to removed from the room before any objective discussion on the issue can be had.
The fact of the matter is, genetic editing has captured the public imagination and it’s at the forefront of bio-tech. It’s going to become a mainstay for generations to come. Reintroducing recently extinct species is a less concerning matter compared to what the method could ultimately be used for. Careful consideration is needed and ethical limitations required. Completely new chimeras should be avoided and, of course, modifications to humans should remain prohibited.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
