These closing chapters transform the book’s philosophical arguments into both pedagogy and fabulation. Chapter 7 explores the method that has been quietly running through the prior chapters, named “the virtue of politeness” by Vinciane Despret (127), a Belgian philosopher and ethologist who studies how scientists and animals shape one another in the field. Chapter 8 then weaves together the various concepts, theories, and terms into a narrative, referring back to the text’s own insistence on the importance of narratives. Together, they argue that the question of how to live on a damaged earth is inseparable from the question of how one asks questions and tells stories about it.

Storytelling as a Tool for Living on a Damaged Planet organizes Chapter 7’s account of Despret’s fieldwork. Haraway’s claim is that observation is itself a narrative practice with consequences for what becomes real. Reporting on Despret’s visit to Amotz Zahavi’s Negev study site, Haraway insists that the Arabian babblers’ altruism and trust-based behavior was “made, but not made up” (128); scientists and birds “rendered each other capable in ways not written into preexisting scripts” (128). The wording stakes out a middle position between two familiar ideas that animal sociality is either a projection of human concepts onto animals or predetermined instinct separate from humans. Haraway’s reading of Despret’s work with Jocelyne Porcher among French farmers does the same labor in a domestic register: The breeders’ refrain, “[W]e don’t know what they want” (129), becomes the working condition of attention, not its failure. The chapter’s pedagogical claim is that politeness, curiosity, and visiting are skills, not dispositions, and that they can be trained.

Storytelling as a Tool for Living on a Damaged Planet also carries Chapter 8. Haraway no longer analyzes other people’s stories but writes one. The Camille fabulation, drafted with Fabrizio Terranova and Despret at Stengers’s 2013 Cerisy colloquium, is offered as “sym fiction, the genre of sympoiesis and symchthonia” (136), and Haraway is candid that “every Camille Story that [she] write[s] will make terrible political and ecological mistakes” (136). That admission acts as a core feature of her argument. A speculative fabulation that claimed to be correct would betray the method that Chapter 7 lays out, which acknowledges that individual organisms are not all-knowing and can only be improved through continuous collaboration with others.

By naming the Great Dithering (roughly 2000-2050), siting Camille’s community on mountaintop-removal land along the Kanawha River, and binding the first child to the eastern and western monarch migrations, Haraway forces the fabulation to inherit specific damages from society as she sees it rather than starting clean in a “better,” idealized circumstance or world. The most consequential turn comes with Camille 2’s sojourn in Michoacán, where the Mazahua women of El Ejército de Mujeres Zapatistas en Defensa del Agua introduce per (the gender-neutral pronoun assigned to people) to monarchs as the souls of the dead. Camille 2 and per’s hosts coin “symanimagenesis” for a kinship the New Gauley vocabulary cannot hold. The story’s own categories require revision in contact with Mazahua practice; this is the politeness of Chapter 7 incorporated into the plot.

The Importance of Seeing Living Things as Kin is the Camille fabulation’s working hypothesis, and Haraway tests it against the kinds of objections that she anticipates her “Make Kin Not Babies” slogan will receive. Each new child requires at least three parents, the gestational parent chooses an animal symbiont from a threatened migratory species, and “no one can be coerced to bear a child or punished for birthing one outside community auspices” (139). The careful insistence on reproductive freedom acknowledges and responds to the long shadow of coercive population-control programs, and the book has to clear that ground before its demographic claim—that humans drop from 10 to 3 billion across four centuries—can be heard as anything other than eugenic.

The fabulation’s answer is that kin-making does the demographic work because it is collaborative, gratifying, and useful, not because it is enforced. Friendship is “the core kin-forming apparatus” alongside play (150), or a multi-practice approach to community; in-migration, lateral kin, and obligations to absent and extinct partners do the rest in providing meaningful and productive relationships. By Camille 4, the monarchs are gone, and the work shifts to the Speakers for the Dead, who draw on Tanya Tagaq’s Animism and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s multinaturalism (the proposition that different beings inhabit the same nature only by inhabiting different ones). The book closes inside its own fabulation rather than outside it, making the argument’s final point that response-ability cannot be promised from a position of safety, only practiced from inside the trouble that one has agreed to inherit.