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Abstract Planetary awareness has become synonymous with awareness of large-scale temporal, geographic, and geologic events. Given the scalar multiplicities and instabilities of life on earth, concepts such as planetarity, the Anthropocene, and even the global have provided analytic reprieve. They name that which is difficult to objectify: the geographic and historical vastness of geological presence. But those concepts grow from knowledge habits inherited from imperial and Cold War logics and can presume the existence of an all-encompassing observer who can grasp the unity of the planet as such. This article explores alternative assumptions. It asks how other practices of the earth deal with planetary scales of sense-making. It conceptualizes those practices as forms of casual planetarity that, instead of drawing on preexisting scales such as the planet or the Anthropocene, produce senses of closeness and/or distance between everyday life and the geological implications of human presence. It follows the work of geologists in Costa Rica who rely on a 3D physical model to bring about scalar oscillations that connect human experiences with the vastness of underground worlds. This association is made possible by focusing on the movement of water as a hydro-geo-social choreography of everyday life. The article shows how the resonant power of the 3D model geologists use to enact these choreographies opens pathways for people to come to terms with their geological presence without having to see the planet as a whole or presume the capacity for total observation. 

At the center of decades-long water conflicts in northwest Costa Rica, a particular fact has had a contentious status: whether the aquifers supplying the area hold sufficient water for collective life. I refer to this as the sufficiency fact, which has been established, debunked, and reestablished multiple times. To understand this peculiar dynamic, I zoom into discussions among community and business representatives about the future of these aquifers. There, in the density of social life, I show how as place-specific formations, facts are “long” entities that remain tied to their interpretations and, crucially, to their potential consequences. As opposed to the ideal of short facts that characterizes modern science, long facts reveal the rich social life that facticity takes in the twenty-first century. Long facts are always contested, explicitly political, and unable to be separated from their potential consequences. In contrast to scholarship that diagnoses the loss of the value of truth within the contemporary moment, I suggest it is critical to understand the abundance of regimes of facticity that surround us and what they make possible leaving behind assumptions of deficit and lack.