Operational imaging, remote sensing, modelling, and other machine-learning intelligences have been developed to present the planet as a sensible and knowable object. But what might it mean to think with the planet? As minerals? As copper ores excavated from beneath the earth? As filamentous underground cables, carrying human-decoded and insect-attracting signals?

Embracing the entanglements between human, ecological and geological timescales, Martin Howse, Patricia MacCormack, and Rosemary Lee rethink and reimagine the environmental through the lens of becoming geological. Tracing how minerals are inhaled and ingested – from the particulates of burning forests to isotopes from nuclear testing or mineral dusts from mining – they examine the complex feedback loops involving climate catastrophe, failing ecological conditions and algorithms. Seeing a need for humans to become sensitive to the planetary at all fathomable scales, this panel explores the geochemical transfers and translations that comprise the planetary and that have always been embodied.