Art exhibitions that try to reckon with humanity’s ever-deepening impact on the environment tend to take one of two approaches: they present either a moralizing suite of ecological horrors or a feel-good tour of a possible greener future. “Sentient Earth,” at the nonprofit exhibition space Amant in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, does neither. Instead the show offers a bracing survey of the many meanings that humans find in what they take from their environment. These are evident in the Surrealist jungle scenes of Hélio Melo, a self-taught artist and rubber tapper who painted with pigments he made from Amazonian plants, as well as in Ignacio Gatica’s LED-screen sunsets, with angular horizons that double as real-time graphs of changing prices for commodities such as copper and oil. The curators tease the hypothesis that the earth is a conscious thing full of feedback mechanisms. This is not a warm and fuzzy picture but a hard look at how human behaviors reverberate through the planet’s systems in unexpected, even biocidal ways.

A grid of black-and-white pictures of rickety wooden coal-mining equipment by the German conceptual photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher is mute on the deleterious effects of fossil fuels. As in all the couple’s typologies of industrial buildings, the mineheads are shot “objectively”—straight on, in natural light. Installed nearby is Mother of Dust (2023), an elegant kinetic sculpture by Nina Canell in which a conveyor belt moves a handful of cultured pearls toward a push broom. The off-white ovoids press into the bristles, bunch up, and recoil several inches, then do it again in a sort of Sisyphean microdrama. Are these gemstones beautiful? Pointless? Alive?

Liu Yujia’s film Treasure Hunt (2021) recounts the history of plunder in the mountainous Xinjiang region of China, from the removal of ancient murals by a British explorer in the early twentieth century to the jade industry of today, in which mining is largely done by Uyghurs for the profit of the Han majority. Viewers may condemn these excesses of colonialism and capitalism, but the film ends on a more ambiguous note, with an extended scene of jade dealers live-streaming from a crowded marketplace, haggling dramatically while praising the stones’ luster and delicacy. Here, as in other luxury-goods markets, the greed and frivolity are appalling. But to extract, it seems, is only human, as is the desire to find transcendence in dead matter.

Several works encourage us to think of digital images, data centers, and “the cloud” as extensions of human nature and therefore in some way intelligent. Green Grey Black Brown (2024), a video by Yuyan Wang, compiles YouTube footage of gurgling mud and bubbling petroleum, industrial farms and artificial plant factories. The imagery is by turns confusing (a man in socks walks into a mud pit) and breathtaking (cataracts of gray water crash beneath a crowded viewing platform). When one is immersed in the rushing slurry of humanity’s collective images, the natural reaction is to scream.

The show ultimately suggests that some uses of raw material are less harmful than others. The conceptual artist and activist Eliza Evans began All the Way to Hell in 2020 after an oil company wanted to mine land that she had inherited in Oklahoma. To thwart greedy frackers, she broke her three acres into around eight thousand tiny parcels, each with its own mineral rights, making the tract legally arduous to reassemble and acquire. Her project is represented in the gallery by a notarized contract in a frame.

What has been extracted in many of these works is intangible. A 2013 trio of cheeky watercolors by John Kelsey depicts data centers with broad, bright strokes. Their style is nonjudgmental, even cheerful, portraying the data centers less as satanic mills than as facts of the modern landscape. “Sentient Earth” argues, harshly but accurately, that humans will not stop digging and scraping and planting any more than we will stop making art. Yet it’s infinitely less destructive to paint a data center than to build one.