Elias Butler

Essential hardware for heinous times! If you enjoy photography of the national parks, here’s a sleeve I’ve created for your "America the Beautiful" National Parks Pass. Four parks are available: Arches, Glacier, Grand Canyon and Grand Teton.

@ThoNg676733 Love this tune. And it probably contributed to the rise of punk.

It's reported that John Lennon first heard this on the radio and said "Is that Paul? Christ that's one hell of a groove"

@WLDdefense Truth is to be concealed, seems to be the directive at all levels.

How Pathetic - a Trump regime Pika sign purge looms.  “Interpretive signs about pikas, white-tailed ptarmigans, high-Alpine tundra and books about Native American history — at two national parks have been flagged for review”. summitdaily.com/news/colorado-…

@OhioHogWatch @ClimateDefiance They'll come up with a subscription model.

@ClimateDefiance The capitalists I'm sure will figure out a way to insert a middleman between you and the sun eventually.

Solar power is clearly the future because the United States cannot blockade or embargo the sun

@PeterCorbett1 Not sure if it's connected, but a recent story showed that visitors ranked Petrified Forest the most "disappointing" national park in the country. I love it myself.

Wildfires and fewer international travelers are likely to blame in part for a 10% dip in Grand Canyon visitation in 2025 from the previous year. Still 4.43 million showed up. Other Arizona parks were also down double digits, including Petrified Forest -43% and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area off 21%

@ClubSTEPHENKING Happy day of birth!

Let's all wish Tabitha a very happy birthday ! ☺️

@WeatherProf I'm a Flagstaff resident for over 30 years. The heat makes for a surreal experience, it feels like summer, the trees are blooming, and every day the traffic increases as refugees from Phoenix escape their own furnace.

Out of all the places I’ve looked into, Flagstaff is the most anomalous. Return interval of > 10K years.

@ECOWARRIORSS Not one person voted for this giveaway of National Forest lands (and an Apache sacred site).

Last hope to save Apache sacred land fizzles out at Supreme Court Trump has transferred the land to a private mining company that will obliterate this ancient land A massive copper mining project to turn a sacred religious site into a 2-mile-wide crater courthousenews.com/last-hope-to-s…

@NWSFlagstaff This year could be a baseline for the near future.

Here is a chart of the highest temperature each March in Flagstaff 1899-2025. The last column is the forecast high temperature Thu-Fri (Mar. 19-20). This would break the March record of 73 by 9 degrees. #azwx

@azfamily Nobody voted for this. Eisenhower protected that land in the 1950s against mining. American copper will go to China, the money will go to UK and Rio Tinto, and America gets a toxic hole.

Apache women seek court intervention as federal land is turned over for copper mining azfamily.com/2026/03/17/apa…

@Race2Extinct Fine essay, and true. Clashes between peoples amplifies the ongoing War against Nature that humanity has been waging for centuries. The technology of war represents a wounding of Nature at every turn from manufacture to detonation.

War is not only a humanitarian catastrophe. It is an ecological one. Forests burn. Rivers are contaminated. Wildlife disappears. Soils are scarred by craters and heavy metals. Entire ecosystems are pushed into states from which they may not recover. Yet the environmental dimension of war is rarely discussed. War is usually described in human terms—casualties, refugees, cities destroyed. But every conflict also unfolds across living landscapes. Media coverage focuses on human suffering and infrastructure loss, while the biosphere absorbs damage that often goes unmeasured and largely unrecorded. The battlefield is only the visible part of war. The ecological damage extends far beyond it. Declaring War—on the Environment War is usually described in human terms—casualties, refugees, cities destroyed. But every conflict also unfolds across living landscapes. Forests burn. Rivers are contaminated. Wildlife disappears. Soils are scarred by craters and heavy metals. Entire ecosystems are pushed into states from which they may not recover. Yet the environmental dimension of war is rarely discussed. Media coverage focuses on human suffering and infrastructure loss, while the biosphere absorbs damage that often goes unmeasured and largely unrecorded. The battlefield is only the visible part of war. The ecological damage extends far beyond it. War is not only a humanitarian catastrophe. It is an ecological one. Across history, conflicts have repeatedly reshaped landscapes and altered ecosystems at scales comparable to major natural disturbances. But unlike hurricanes, fires, or floods, the ecological consequences of war are seldom treated as environmental events. They exist in a blind spot—visible to those who study landscapes, but largely absent from public discussion. Several ecological consequences of war illustrate how deeply conflict alters the living world. 1. War Creates Instant Industrial Landscapes Modern warfare concentrates industrial activity into small areas at extraordinary intensity. Armored vehicles churn and compact soils. Artillery fragments scatter metals across landscapes. Military vehicles compress ground that once absorbed water and supported vegetation. Explosions leave craters that alter drainage patterns and fragment habitats. These impacts resemble mining operations more than traditional battlefields. The land is not simply disturbed—it is industrialized. In many conflict zones, soils, water sources, and coastal waters become contaminated with lead, mercury, explosives residues, and fuel. These pollutants can persist for decades or centuries, altering plant communities and entering food webs. Long after fighting stops, landscapes often remain chemically altered. 2. War Disrupts the Biological Memory of Landscapes Ecosystems store their history in soils, seed banks, and biological communities. War damages all three. Bombardment strips vegetation. Fires destroy forests and grasslands. Heavy machinery crushes soil structure that took centuries to form. Once that structure is lost, ecosystems lose part of their ability to rebuild themselves. Vegetation may return, but it is often composed of different species adapted to disturbed ground. Nutrient cycles shift. Soil organisms decline. Water infiltration that recharges groundwater aquifers is reduced. What returns after war is rarely the ecosystem that existed before it. War erases ecological memory. 3. Conflict Zones Become Ecological Blind Spots When war begins, environmental monitoring often stops. Scientists leave. Research programs collapse. Wildlife surveys cease. Pollution monitoring disappears. Protected areas lose staff and enforcement. As a result, ecosystems within conflict zones effectively vanish from scientific observation. Species declines—and even extinctions—may go unrecorded. Illegal logging, mining, and hunting expand without oversight. Rivers, streams, and wetlands may become contaminated without anyone measuring the damage. Entire regions of the biosphere can slip into data silence during conflict—places where ecological damage occurs but no one is watching. 4. War Alters Wildlife Populations in Complex Ways Conflict can both devastate wildlife and temporarily protect it. In some areas, warfare drives large animals to local extinction through hunting, habitat destruction, or displacement. Poaching often increases as armed groups finance operations through wildlife products. But in other places, depopulation of rural areas can briefly reduce agricultural pressure. Croplands are abandoned. Roads become less traveled. Some wildlife populations expand in the absence of people. These temporary refuges rarely last. When conflict ends, reconstruction, extraction, and renewed settlement often arrive quickly, compressing wildlife back even further into shrinking habitat. War therefore produces ecological whiplash—periods of sudden release followed by intensified pressure. 5. The Global Military System Operates Outside Environmental Accounting Perhaps the least discussed ecological consequence of war is the scale of the military system itself. Modern militaries are among the largest industrial enterprises on Earth. They consume enormous quantities of fossil fuels, metals, chemicals, and manufactured materials. Fighter jets, naval fleets, armored vehicles, and weapons production all carry substantial environmental footprints. The fuel consumption alone is staggering. Modern militaries are among the largest institutional consumers of fossil fuel on Earth. Modern combat aircraft burn thousands of gallons of fuel per hour, while global military logistics require fleets of ships, trucks, and aircraft operating continuously. Yet military emissions and pollution are often poorly reported or partially excluded from international climate accounting frameworks—a legacy of political exemptions written into early global climate agreements. This creates a strange paradox. One of the largest industrial systems on Earth operates largely outside the environmental scrutiny applied to other industries. War as an Ecological Force War does not merely damage ecosystems locally. It amplifies nearly every driver of ecological decline simultaneously. It accelerates resource extraction. It expands fossil fuel consumption. It disrupts land management and environmental governance. It pushes landscapes into states from which recovery becomes difficult or impossible. And yet the ecological dimension of war remains largely invisible in public discourse. This invisibility reflects a broader pattern. Humans tend to perceive environmental change only when it occurs gradually and within the boundaries of an ordinary human life—forests thinning, rivers warming, wildlife disappearing over decades. War, like floods and earthquakes, is treated as a temporary emergency, something separate from the environmental systems it reshapes. But the biosphere does not experience war as an emergency. It experiences it as disturbance. And like all disturbances, the effects accumulate. A Missing Piece of Environmental Awareness Environmental discussions often focus on agriculture, industry, energy, and climate. These forces matter enormously, but they are not the only ways humans reshape the planet. War is one of the most concentrated ecological disturbances our species produces. It compresses industrial activity, extraction, fire, pollution, and landscape transformation into moments of extraordinary intensity. For ecosystems caught in those moments, the consequences are often irreversible. The biosphere records these disturbances long after human history moves on. Craters become wetlands. Forests regrow over battlefields. Metals linger in soils for centuries. War may be temporary for societies. For landscapes, its echoes can last far longer. The Paradox of War War also reveals a deeper paradox about how modern societies interact with the environment. We tear down landscapes to build infrastructure—roads, pipelines, factories, ports. Then war tears down that infrastructure with bombs, artillery, and fire. And when the fighting stops, we tear down more of the environment again to rebuild what was destroyed. The cycle resembles a ratchet rather than a loop. Landscapes are stripped to build infrastructure, stripped again to destroy it, and stripped once more to rebuild what was lost. Each turn leaves the biosphere further depleted than before. At every stage—construction, destruction, and reconstruction—resources are extracted, landscapes are altered, and ecosystems absorb the cost. War does not only destroy landscapes. It removes them from the moral equation. War also narrows the range of questions society is willing to ask. In peacetime, environmental damage may be debated, regulated, or litigated. In wartime, those questions often disappear. Landscapes become terrain, rivers become obstacles, forests become cover, and ecosystems become collateral. Anyone who pauses to ask about ecological consequences risks being seen as naïve—or even disloyal. The implicit premise is rarely stated but widely understood: When national survival is invoked, the environment has no standing. War does not suspend environmental damage. It suspends the willingness to question it. War does not interrupt the environmental pressures of industrial society. It intensifies them where fighting occurs—and amplifies them across the wider industrial system that sustains the war. And every phase of the cycle is profitable for someone. War is one of the few moments when societies openly declare that the biosphere has no standing in human decisions. Article published on Substack

@RonFilipkowski Our government gives our public lands to a foreign corp to destroy for profit. Nobody voted for this. Eisenhower protected that land in the 1950s against mining. But now American copper will go to China, the money will go to UK and Rio Tinto, and America gets a toxic hole.

America first is letting foreign companies come into the US to mine copper?

@abc15 @OpinePinAZ Nobody voted for this public lands giveaway.

The transfer of federal forest land in Arizona to a pair of international companies that plan to mine one of the largest copper deposits in North America is complete, but a group of Apache women is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene as a last-ditch effort to stop the project. abc15.com/news/state/apa…

@CrytzerFry I checked but didn't see your email for some reason.

This #trailcam is completely malfunctioning half the time, but it rendered some pretty artistic shots of #cattle.

@CrytzerFry You captured the cow mystique.

@EL444KR @TheMonologist No problem it's a great movie! Rob Reiner was the director BTW.

@EliasButlerAZ @TheMonologist Seriously? Ok then def watch! I couldn’t find it anywhere last time I looked so thx for that

@EL444KR @TheMonologist It's free on Youtube also.

@TheMonologist Give “The Sure Thing” a rewatch too. I had to buy it bc it’s not available to stream but I laughed my ass off. Forgot how funny it is

@CrytzerFry Nice shot!

Photographing #bees is hard. Granted, I do not have the skills, nor the right tools, but dang it, buzzy friends, stay still! (And why did that dead leaf have to be in my way? 😁)

@nateinthewild A naturally illiterate fellow.

People who don’t understand that the outdoor recreation industry generates $1.3 TRILLION in annual revenue in the US alone are not financially literate. Or perhaps literate at all.

@ShaharzadAkbar If women were in charge this wouldn't happen.

All of us, our children, future generations and our beautiful planet will pay for the environmental toll of these destructive wars driven by greedy, unhinged men. I am heartbroken for our earth, with so many bleeding scars on her body, caused by the wars and war-mongers.

@RpsAgainstTrump A commemorative Gary Tison license plate would be tasteful by comparison.

NEW: Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs has vetoed a bill that would have created a specialty license plate honoring Charlie Kirk. “I will continue working toward solutions that bring people together, but this bill falls short of that standard by inserting politics into a function of government that should remain nonpartisan,” Governor Hobbs wrote in her veto letter.