The middle chapters of Staying With the Trouble turn from theoretical groundwork into Haraway’s most pointed political and ethical demands. Chapter 4 issues the slogan “Make Kin Not Babies!” (102), Chapter 5 traces the multispecies costs of two estrogen drugs through her own household, and Chapter 6 reaches for Le Guin’s carrier bag and Octavia Butler’s Earthseed to argue that the kind of story one tells determines the kind of future one can inhabit. Read together, these chapters move the book from naming the trouble to specifying what response-ability—the practiced obligation to respond across species—actually requires of a reader.

Chapter 4’s argument is that naming the present epoch is itself a political act and that the names already in circulation are not adequate to what people owe one another and other “critters,” her catch-all term for human and non-human species. Haraway accepts Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Plantationocene as partial diagnoses, but she argues that the decisive issues are “scale, rate/speed, synchronicity, and complexity” and that the Anthropocene is better treated “as a boundary event” than as a long epoch to settle into (100). It is a boundary between the Holocene before and what comes next. The job, she writes, is “to make the Anthropocene as short/thin as possible” (100). From this comes the chapter’s demographic provocation that human numbers must come down.

Haraway insists that this must occur by joyful kin-making rather than coercion, with kin understood as “an assembling sort of word” drawn from Marilyn Strathern’s anthropology rather than from biogenetic family (103). The Importance of Seeing Living Things as Kin is the chapter’s argumentative core, and Haraway is careful to clarify what she means: “Kin making is making persons, not necessarily as individuals or as humans” (103). The slogan’s force depends on this redefinition. If kin still meant blood, the demand would simply be antinatalism; because kin means lateral, chosen, multispecies obligation, the demand reframes population as a question about which relationships count as relatives. This key argument has earned some of the book’s broader ire, as philosophical discussion of population reduction can be a hallmark of colonial and racist eugenics theories. However, Haraway emphasizes that a gradual reduction in population would arise by will, not force, due to a broader acceptance of what critters constitute family, or kin, and an understanding of what practices benefit the earth.

Chapter 5 tests Haraway’s abstract theories on responsibility and kinship through her own complicity. The DES and Premarin histories are not illustrations attached to a prior argument; they are the argument because Haraway uses her own dog Cayenne and her own menopause to show that knowing about cross-species harm after the fact is the ordinary condition of life, not an exception. The Evolution of Nature in a Collective System is represented by the narrative: A single gelcap given to one aging dog draws in Iowa State feedlot research, Oxford biochemistry of 1938, the 1971 New England Journal of Medicine report on vaginal clear cell adenocarcinoma in DES daughters, Quebec contract farms, and the 2002 Women’s Health Initiative findings. Haraway’s analytical move is to refuse the cleaner story in which she would have known better. By wondering, “Did I forget, never know, not look—or just not care?” (111), she does not resolve the question or absolve herself of wrongdoing. The chapter argues instead that response-ability is built by tracing such failures rather than by pre-empting them: “Shame is a prod to lifelong rethinking and recrafting one’s accountabilities” (111). The chapter offers a method by which to act, not a verdict on one’s guilt. The former is a motivator, whereas the latter is paralytic.

Chapter 6 then asks what kind of narrative form can carry such complex, tentacular obligations and answers with Le Guin. Storytelling as a Tool for Living on a Damaged Planet is the chapter’s explicit subject. Haraway reads Le Guin’s “Author of the Acacia Seeds” against the grain of its own fictional therolinguists, who decide that ant-script on de-germinated acacia seeds is “art” rather than communication. The point of the rereading is that, from her perspective, the therolinguists are wrong in the way Western biology has been wrong. They cannot see a working mutualism (ants dispersing seeds for elaiosomes or acacias housing Pseudomyrmex and Crematogaster bodyguards in hollow stipules) because their traditional narrative about life doesn’t include it.

Le Guin’s carrier-bag theory—stories as nets and shells that gather companion species rather than wielding or othering them—is offered as the alternative. Pairing this with Olamina’s Earthseed in Parable of the Sower, Haraway argues that sympoiesis (making-with) can be carried by fiction in a way it cannot by the hero’s narrative. Haraway is not recommending stories as supplements to science or politics, but rather arguing that the choice between hero narratives and carrier-bag narratives precedes the choice between fatalist and recuperative practices. An analysis of one’s own working stories about the world can determine whether kin-making is even currently thinkable as a project.