I realize how configured my sense of distance has become from living so much on the Internet, where everything is in reach and nothing is within touch.

In Brisbane an explorer known as Dsankt boats into the underland like some latter-day Charon, boarding small skiffs in the rivers on the city’s outskirts, following tides up the intake valves and into the abstract zones of the sub-city.

The weight on 2,000-year-old ice can reach half-a-ton per square inch.

A single pellet of enriched uranium one centimetre in diameter and one centimetre long will typically release the same amount of energy as a ton of coal.

Both of the two main models of interpretation that Merlin has told me about – the ‘socialist’ and the ‘free-market’ models – smuggle a very human politics into a more-than-human science. According to the ‘free-market’ model, the connected forest is to be understood as a competitive system, in which all entities act out of self-interest within a

‘Nexus’ – ‘the connection or connections between the parts of a system or a group of entities’.

The same three tasks recur across cultures and epochs: to shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and to dispose of what is harmful. Shelter (memories, precious matter, messages, fragile lives). Yield (information, wealth, metaphors, minerals, visions). Dispose (waste, trauma, poison, secrets). Into the underland we have long placed