“Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present […] as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.”

Haraway directly attacks futurism as the dominant frame for environmental thinking, which focuses primarily on potential outcomes for life on earth. She names the two future-oriented positions she rejects: the presumption of an apocalypse or salvation, both of which ignore the need for widespread action in the present. Her counterproposal is what she calls the “thick present,” a temporality dense with inheritance and obligation rather than aimed at outcomes. The word “unfinished” is the operative one since it dismisses any position based on arrival, completion, or resolution.

“Trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future […] Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.”

Haraway gives the book’s title verb its working definition. To “make trouble” sounds disruptive, as she believes the current system requires significant change, but she pairs it with settling and rebuilding to emphasize the development of a new, flourishing means of interspecies relations with each other and nature. The doubled task, stirring and settling, captures the rhythm of the work she recommends across the book. By placing this against the future-oriented postures she just rejected, she offers a different perspective: Trouble is something created or confronted in the present, not solved for later. The passage clarifies that “staying with the trouble” is an active practice, not a posture of passive endurance.

“Chthonic ones are not safe; they have no truck with ideologues; they belong to no one; they writhe and luxuriate in manifold forms and manifold names in all the airs, waters, and places of earth.”

Haraway introduces the chthonic as a category that resists ownership and instrumentalization, representing all interconnected life on earth, which is the core of her objection to both Anthropocene and Capitalocene framings. The chthonic represent forces that exceed any human perspective, including environmentalist ones. By insisting “they belong to no one,” she rules out the possibility of speaking for the earth in the way that both extractive industry and salvation-narrative environmentalism claim to. The catalog of “airs, waters, and places” performs the kind of complex, inclusive materiality her argument requires. This passage explains why she will spend the book proposing a third name, the Chthulucene, in place of the two she finds inadequate.

“Make Kin Not Babies”

Haraway compresses the most controversial claim of the book into a slogan modeled on protest signs. The slogan does two argumentative jobs at once: It rejects pronatalism as a default ethic, and it expands the category of kin beyond reproductive descent. She knows the formulation potentially echoes coercive population reduction theories, which often veer into misogynistic and racist territory, but she returns to defend it across multiple chapters as a natural, more positive result of “kin-making.” The slogan’s force depends on hearing both halves equally; “Make Kin” is as demanding as “Not Babies.” She believes that a culture that earnestly appreciates inter-species relationships will naturally prioritize human reproduction less.

“An ubiquitous figure in this book is SF: science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far. This reiterated list […] braid[s] me and my readers into beings and patterns at stake.”

Haraway names her methodological signature and refuses to choose among its meanings. The decision to keep all six readings of SF active simultaneously is itself the argument; she will not separate fact finding from fiction making or scientific knowledge from narrative practice. The verb “braiding” places the reader inside the patterning rather than outside it as the audience. By calling the list “reiterated,” she signals that repetition across the book is a feature, not a stylistic accident. Her concepts are meant to be encountered repeatedly until they become usable. The passage tells the reader how to read what follows.

“We become-with each other or not at all.”

Haraway issues the book’s most condensed thesis as a flat declarative. The hyphenated verb “become-with” is borrowed from Vinciane Despret, though she uses this grammatic technique in different versions across the narrative, and it carries her rejection of bounded individualism. The “or not at all” closes off compromise; there is no version of becoming that happens in isolation, whether for humans, microbes, or other species. By stating it as an absolute, Haraway makes an ontological claim, not just an ethical recommendation. This is the philosophical foundation of The Evolution of Nature in a Collective System.

“Staying with the trouble requires making oddkin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles.”

Haraway introduces “oddkin” as the name for the kind of relation she wants the book to cultivate. The compost pile is her preferred figure because it works through decomposition and recombination rather than preservation of singular natures. The qualifier “unexpected” rules out kinship as confirmation of what one already is; the relations that matter are with beings outside one’s familiar categories. By “requiring” this practice, she insists that this is not about charity or an extension of moral concern but about mutual necessity. The passage compresses the practical instruction related to the importance of seeing living things as kin.

“It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”

Haraway lays down one of the book’s most quoted passages. The recursive grammar performs the claim it makes; matters thinking matters, and stories make stories, with everything existing within and contributing to this loop. She asserts that people’s choice of mindsets when interpreting the world inherently shape how they continue to view and respond to everything around them—there isn’t a singular, inherent reality. Creating narratives is intentional. The choice of stories, knots, thoughts, descriptions, and ties as parallel terms is deliberate; for her, all of them are material practices with consequences. This is the methodological license under the theme of Storytelling as a Tool for Living on a Damaged Planet.

“Becoming-with, not becoming, is the name of the game; becoming-with is how partners are, in Vinciane Despret’s terms, rendered capable.”

Haraway tightens the verb she has been using by contrasting it with its unhyphenated form. “Becoming” alone preserves the individualist picture of a self developing over time; “becoming-with” insists that development happens between, not within. By crediting Despret, she signals that her own thinking is itself an instance of being rendered capable by another thinker. The phrase “name of the game” is plainspoken on purpose, refusing the academic register that the concept could easily attract. This passage is a simple, clear example of the relational ontology that the rest of the book relies on.

“Pigeons are competent agents—in the double sense of both delegates and actors—who render each other and human beings capable of situated social, ecological, behavioral, and cognitive practices.”

Haraway argues that competence is distributed and reciprocal rather than a property that any single species holds. The phrase “render each other capable” is technical for her; it names an active process of mutual constitution that humans participate in but do not control. By giving pigeons the dignity of being “delegates” as well as “actors,” she draws on actor-network vocabulary while extending it to nonhuman animals. The catalog of “social, ecological, behavioral, and cognitive” refuses any clean line between biology and culture. Pigeons here are a worked example of the principle that nothing makes itself alone.

“What is commemorated, then, is not the animal alone, nor the practice alone, but the activation of two ‘becomings-with’ that are written explicitly into the origin of the project.”

Haraway extends the “becoming-with” concept from biological pairing to commemorative practice. Translating Despret in her analysis of the pigeon loft, she argues that what gets honored in such projects is the relationship itself, which is older and more fragile than either party. The two “becomings-with” are pigeons becoming racing voyageurs and humans becoming colombophiles, or pigeon fanciers, and neither happens without the other. By calling this an “activation,” she gives commemoration a function beyond memory; it actively prolongs the relationship into the present. The passage demonstrates how cultural practices should exist inside the multispecies frame.

“Think we must; we must think.”

Haraway repeats Virginia Woolf’s imperative as a refusal of the “thoughtlessness” that Hannah Arendt diagnosed in the Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann. The mirrored structure forces a slower, more intentional reading of the statement that emphasizes the obligation within it. By placing the demand inside her account of the Anthropocene, she suggests that the failure to think characterizes contemporary environmental and political conduct as much as it characterized 1940s Europe. The passage rules out the cynical assumptions of humanity’s future as a form of not-thinking. Throughout the book, this refrain demands that her work be interpreted through this lens.

“Eichmann was astralized right out of the muddle of thinking into the practice of business as usual no matter what.”

Haraway coins “astralized” to name the move from grounded thought into abstraction that loses contact with consequence. The image implies that Eichmann’s failure was in refusing to think in interspecies connections, the “compost” or “muddle” that Haraway promotes. By linking this to “business as usual no matter what,” she draws a direct line from one man’s thoughtlessness to contemporary institutional inertia in the face of mass extinction. The passage explains why she will spend so much of the book on practices of attention, mourning, and relay; these are the muscles that thoughtlessness lets atrophy.

“Mourning is about dwelling with a loss and so coming to appreciate what it means, how the world has changed, and how we must ourselves change and renew our relationships if we are to move forward from here.”

Haraway, drawing on Thom van Dooren, names mourning as a practice of attention rather than a private emotion. The verb “dwelling” frames mourning as an emotion to maintain in order to preserve what was rather than a feeling of permanent loss that must eventually be processed and left behind. By tying mourning to changed relationships, she makes grief productive without sentimentalizing it. This explains why the closing Camille stories need speakers for the dead as a recurring role; mourning is part of the institutional architecture of any livable future. The passage gives ethical meaning to the imperative to stay with the trouble.

“We are humus, not Homo, not anthropos; we are compost, not posthuman.”

Haraway closes her introduction of the Chthulucene with a four-part declaration that compresses the whole argument against human exceptionalism. The wordplay between “humus” and “Homo” as an etymological shared root makes the claim feel less invented than recovered. By rejecting both “Homo” and “posthuman,” she refuses the two available framings, the humanist self-image and the technological transcendence of it. The alternative is chthonic and earthly. “Compost” is doing dense work here as an answer to “posthuman”; it names what humans are made of and what they will become, with no surplus left over for the autonomous subject. This line condenses much of the book’s central argument into a simple assertion.

“Coral and lichen symbionts also bring us richly into the storied tissues of the thickly present Chthulucene, where it remains possible—just barely—to play a much better SF game, in nonarrogant collaboration with all those in the muddle.”

Haraway highlights the precarity of the project she is recommending. The parenthetical “just barely” is what gives the sentence its honesty; the Chthulucene is possible but not promised. By calling collaboration “nonarrogant,” she names the disposition that the work requires, which rules out both technocratic confidence and salvationist humility. “Storied tissues” insists that the biological and the narrative are the same fabric, which is the recurring claim across the book. The passage conveys that hope should exist, but it’s conditional.

“It matters which thoughts think thoughts. We must think!”

Haraway closes one of her central theoretical chapters with a compressed restatement of her two recurring imperatives. The first sentence repeats the recursive formulation that she established earlier, which by this point in the book can be recognized as a refrain. The second sentence drops to its barest form, three words and an exclamation, refusing further elaboration. The minimalism is the argument; thought is not a luxury one can afford to refuse if they care for the future of the earth. Coming at the end of the long “Tentacular Thinking” chapter, the passage creates the urgency that the chapter has been building.

“Sympoiesis is a simple word; it means ‘making-with.’ Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing.”

Haraway introduces a central biological concept by setting it against autopoiesis, the self-making framework dominant in 20th-century systems theory. The two-word definition is deliberately accessible because the concept is meant to be portable across disciplines. By saying that nothing is “really” autopoietic, she makes a strong empirical claim about how living systems actually work, not just a preferred metaphor. The passage carries the weight of decades of biological argument about symbiosis, holobionts, and microbial entanglement, all compressed into one line. This is the verbatim foundation of the evolution of nature in a collective system.

“We become-with each other or not at all […] Critters do not precede their relatings; they make each other through semiotic material involution, out of the beings of previous such entanglements.”

Haraway restates her ontological claim in technical biological vocabulary, drawing on Lynn Margulis’s work on symbiogenesis. The phrase “do not precede their relatings” inverts the standard picture in which preformed individuals enter into optional relationships. “Semiotic material involution” names her insistence that meaning making and physical entanglement are the same process, not parallel ones. The reach back to “previous such entanglements” gives the picture historical depth; current critters are the result of past becomings-with. This offers the biological ground for the kinship politics that follows.

“Holobionts require models tuned to an expandable number of quasi-collective/quasi-individual partners in constitutive relatings; these relationalities are the objects of study. The partners do not precede the relatings.”

Haraway argues that the biological sciences need new model organisms because the old ones assume the very individualism the new biology disproves. The doubled “quasi” prefix registers her impatience with the individual-versus-collective binary; holobionts are neither and both. By insisting that the relations are “the objects of study,” she pushes against a default scientific gaze that treats relations as secondary to the entities relating. The repetition of “partners do not precede the relatings” three pages after she first said it shows how important this concept is to her analysis of new biological research.

“Make kin, not babies! It matters how kin generate kin.”

Haraway returns to the slogan and adds a second sentence that complicates it. The follow-on, “It matters how kin generate kin,” signals that she’s not against generation but against assuming that generation must be biological reproduction. She is also signaling that kin-making practices have politics since some ways of generating kin are coercive and some are liberatory. The pairing prevents the slogan from being read as simply anti-natalist; the question is how, not just whether. This is the core of the chapter’s argument and a key element regarding the importance of seeing living things as kin.

“All earthlings are kin in the deepest sense, and it is past time to practice better care of kinds-as-assemblages (not species one at a time). Kin is an assembling sort of word.”

Haraway pushes kinship past species boundaries by treating species themselves as assemblages rather than discrete units. The shift from “species one at a time” to “kinds-as-assemblages” is consequential for conservation practice; what gets cared for changes when the unit changes. By calling kin “an assembling sort of word,” she makes the noun do verbal work; the word performs the gathering it names. The phrase “past time” registers her impatience, which she will sustain across her closing argument about human numbers. The passage conceptualizes the kind of multispecies coalition that the closing chapters describe.

“We are all responsible to and for shaping conditions for multispecies flourishing in the face of terrible histories, and sometimes joyful histories too, but we are not all response-able in the same ways. The differences matter—in ecologies, economies, species, lives.”

Haraway distinguishes universal responsibility from differentiated capacity to respond. The hyphenated “response-able” is her technical term for the cultivated capacity that her argument is built around, distinct from moral responsibility in a traditional sense. By insisting that capacities differ across ecologies, economies, species, and lives, she rules out flat appeals to “we” that dissolve power and position. The phrase “sometimes joyful histories too” is the concession to pleasure in a paragraph about obligation, which keeps the ethics from sliding into a negative obligation, which can be paralyzing. This passage describes the working definition of response-ability that the book uses throughout.