A young Austrian girl who has a “bushcraft” (camping) channel about surviving with very little in the wild has a YouTube channel with over a million followers. Her channel is named “Survival Lilly” but her real name is Elisabeth Puntigam. She lives in lower Austria and is an educated self—made woman of 38 years old. She is worth an estimated million dollars (American) today.
After high school, Puntigam found herself like so many of us wondering what she wanted to be as a grown up. She decided to go to college where she would major in economics and graduated with a Masters of Business Administration (MBA). Puntigam wound up employed in the corporate world, working as a tax consultant in the Austrian capital of Vienna for a time.
Soon her childhood roots came back to haunt her as office life was not a life for her. As a child she grew up exploring the countryside around her home and became quite adept at foraging for berries and mushrooms while she lived out in the wild. This soon led to overnight camping in the wild of lower Austria.
Getting back to her roots she became a content creator of “bushcraft” which is a form of surviving in the wild with every little. For Lilly, it involves bow hunting, developing one’s survival skills, and reviewing essential products that can help survivalists of all levels with their primitive living skills. The difference between a “prepper” and a “bushcrafter” is the one is preparing for a dire future in a home base of operation while the other is prepared to live in the wild with very little at all and can be mobile.
The website Famous People Today reports in 2011 Puntigam’s Survival Lilly channel started off small as she was doing the channel so Puntigam’s friends wouldn’t see her videos on her personal channel and so she would remain anonymous. While her personal channel had her videos recorded in her native tongue of German, her Survival Lilly channel had videos recorded in English. In 2013 she only had 2,000 subscribers but by 2014 she had almost 100,000 subscribers! From there she left her office job behind and was able to make a full-time living from her channel and never looked back. Puntigam earns most of her money from ads on her YouTube channel, sponsors, and selling survivalist equipment on her website at survivallilly.at.
What is most interesting about Puntigam is she recently began offering people of the world (specifically Europe) very good prepper advice in several of her newest videos. While Survival Lilly is not into politics at all, it is clear her messages are to help people survive the globalist’s “Great Reset”. People all over the world would be well advised to listen to her as well as others like her. In the case of Lilly, she is also offering us insight into life deteriorating in Austria this year.
In 1999 I traveled to Austria to visit our hometown of “Schwendau” with several of my cousins. It was a surreal experience. We learned much about the country of Austria and the Austrian people. We had lunch with the mayor and learned much more. At that time we learned that Austria was 98% pure Austrians (people born there). We learned most people believed in God and attended church regularly and most churches were Catholic. Crime was not a serious issue. Austrian people generally lived by “The Golden Rule” of doing onto others as you would have them do to you.
I mention all of this to give context to what Survival Lilly reports in this video of today. Austria is living with over 10% inflation. A major Austrian petroleum refinery plant had a recent “accident” which is now being investigated as a crime of sabotage and the Austrian “Secret Service is investigating this issue. Austria is now operating on its strategic oil reserve supply. This impacts both heating oil and petroleum for transportation needs.
Survival Lilly then goes into great detail about the desperation growing in Austria. She mentions people stealing. Specifically she mentions the rise in shoplifting including high value meats and how grocery stores are now adding security tags and labels to sound alarms for those exiting these stores without paying for them. She mentions how store employees are being told not to confront shoplifters but to turn over security videos to law enforcement for them to pursue these people as criminals.
She also goes into great detail, as a survivalist of the wild into discussing how Austrian people are illegally cutting firewood to make it through the upcoming winter months. Most of the forests of Austria are owned by the government of Austria and while it is legal to harvest certain foods like wild berries and mushrooms, it is never legal to take down trees for firewood. She also mentions how some property is private property and it, also, is not legal to trespass on for the purposes of collecting illegal firewood.
She goes on to discuss how most homes and apartment flats are not even equipped to burn wood which means if home heating oil and natural gas runs out, Austrians are expected to resort to using electric space heaters. She predicts that this, in turn, will crash the electric power grid as this is one of the least energy efficient ways for people to keep from freezing but will undoubtedly be the most used. She mentions how electric heaters are already in short supply or sold out of the stores.
CONCLUSION:
For whatever reason our news media has been guilty of not reporting the world news as well as it once did many years ago. In the case of Austria and all of Europe, Survival Lilly may be offering us a foreshadowing of what is to come to us in the west. This is why it is so important to share information around the world. She is a very intelligent and thoughtful woman and her words and observations are worth noting for all of us.
The fact that this young entrepreneur has shifted her focus from wilderness survival lessons to prepper survivalism is noteworthy. My perception of this woman, like most of the world population, is she is apolitical with a truly caring heart. She simply wants to do that which is right and help mankind.
I have been watching this young lady for a number of years now. The look of concern and panic in her face in recent videos she has posted cannot go unnoticed. The law-abiding good Christian people of Austria are becoming lawless in the interest of providing for their families. Inflation coupled with rising food and energy costs have caused Austrian’s savings do diminish. They are now living on diminishing returns and they are realizing this.
As I listened to her words while reflecting on other relative current events of these times such as the sabotage of Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, several thoughts crossed my mind;
- All of these “accidents” of fires and explosions around the world relative to our food and energy supply can no longer be thought of as random. One would have to be a perfect idiot to not connect the dots of this being an actual conspiracy with a singular motive rather than continuing to dismiss those who question these occurrences as simple-minded “conspiracy theorists”.
- Those who feel a significant portion of the world’s population needs to die off in order to “save the planet” are operating from false narrative. The real motive is about power and control and a minority of “global elitists” cannot advance their agenda so long as the majority continues to rule.
- There is safety in numbers so one must assume that those who want to starve or freeze out much of the population of the world now are looking to do so for a military logistics advantage and this has nothing to do with “saving the planet”. Covid-19 didn’t do the job so it would seem the globalists have decided to move on to a new phase of their plan.
At some point in time the world population needs to wake up and take back control of this situation.
The motto of, “You will own nothing and you will be happy,” needs change to, “We, the people, are going to take you out, and you are probably not going to be happy.”
Copyright © 2022 by Mark S. Schwendau
About the Author
Mark S. Schwendau is a retired technology professor who has always had a sideline in news-editorial writing where his byline has been, “Bringing little known news to people who simply want to know the truth.” He classifies himself as a Christian conservative who God cast to be a realist. Mark is an award-winning educator who has published 7 books and numerous peer-reviewed trade journal articles some of which can be found on the Internet. His father was a fireman/paramedic while his mother was a registered nurse. He holds multiple degrees in technology education, industrial management, OSHA Safety, and Driver’s Education. His personal website is www.IDrawIWrite.Tech.
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.
