Haraway opens Staying With the Trouble by rejecting two reflexes that she finds equally demotivating in terms of proactively fighting negative global forces: the faith that engineering and new technology will “save” humanity and the “game over” cynicism that treats catastrophe as already settled. Both, she argues, are forms of what she calls “futurism”—modes of attention that look past the actual present toward an imagined endpoint, whether bad or good. Her counterproposal is the Chthulucene, a coined “timeplace” built from khthôn (earthly) and kainos (now, fresh beginnings), which names a present with requisite inheritance and obligation rather than as a runway toward a fixed future. The naming work matters because it sets the terms of response; “Anthropocene” and “Capitalocene” both prioritize humans and capital and thus can only imagine humanity or capital as the response to the issues at hand. From Haraway’s perspective, renaming the era in which we live to a term with a connotation of earthliness and multispecies connection allows for a new vision of how society could respond to issues such as ecological disasters and extinction events.

That insistence is what gives one of the Introduction’s quotes its weight: “We become-with each other or not at all” (4). This clear, direct claim sets up the theme of The Evolution of Nature in a Collective System. Haraway sees being intertwined with other species within a broader earth as a literal position from which to plan concrete, unified, and scientific action toward an improved future. Haraway pairs the line with the idea that “[a]lone, in our separate kinds of expertise and experience, we know both too much and too little” (4). The despair-hope binary, on her account, is a symptom of trying to think from a boundaried, individualistic position that biology and politics no longer support. The Introduction thus names both a metaphysical claim (all beings exist in relation to one another) and an epistemic one (no single expertise can solve the earth’s problems), treating both as preconditions for the “kin-making” argument that the rest of the book develops. Her definition of “kin” aligns with this perspective, as she asserts that people should find “oddkin,” or kin with whom people don’t share family or other preset communities. She calls for a willing, conscious intent to bond with others.

Chapter 1’s pigeons are the first test of whether that claim can carry concrete weight, and Haraway uses them to develop the theme of Storytelling as a Tool for Living on a Damaged Planet. The chapter’s central term, SF, is a multipurpose literary tool that gathers science fiction, speculative fabulation, science fact, speculative feminism, string figures, and “so far” into a single method for analyzing the book’s major questions. Terrapolis (her fabricated version of terra, the earth) is offered explicitly as “at once a story, a speculative fabulation, and a string figure for multispecies worlding” (11). The point of dressing an idealistic worldview as an equation is meant to refuse the choice between scientific description and imaginative depictions. Marilyn Strathern’s dictum that “it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas with” is the chapter’s working principle (12), and Haraway extends it: “[I]t matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories” (12). The argument is that practices or theories, such as scientific ones, are inseparable from others, such as artistic ones. Like the interconnected approach she proposes, it is productive, if not crucial, to think in multidisciplinary ways.

The “PigeonBlog” material is where this stops being abstract. Beatriz da Costa’s project equipped racing pigeons with GPS and pollution sensors, and Haraway is careful to specify that the engineering took three months, while building trust between pigeons, fancier Bob Matsuyama, and the artist-researchers took nearly a year. That asymmetry is the chapter’s real evidence. The organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) objected to the project, claiming that it lacked scientific teleology and was therefore unjustified “play.” Haraway claims that this gets the moral grammar backward: “Perhaps it is precisely in the realm of play, outside the dictates of teleology, settled categories, and function, that serious worldliness and recuperation become possible” (22). The defense is not that the data were useful (though they were) but that the collaboration rendered its participants—birds, fanciers, engineers, neighborhoods near refineries—capable of relations and ideas that they could not have approached alone.

Vinciane Despret’s reading of Matali Crasset’s Caudry pigeon loft gives Haraway her sharpest articulation of The Importance of Seeing Living Things as Kin at this early stage in the book. What the loft commemorates, Despret writes, and Haraway endorses is “not the animal alone, nor the practice alone, but the activation of two ‘becomings-with’” (24). Pigeons make fanciers talented, fanciers make pigeons reliable, and the kinship is the achievement, not a precondition. Meanwhile, in Melbourne, Australia, Batman Park sits on Aboriginal Wurundjeri country dispossessed in an 1835 transaction for 600,000 acres later repudiated by the Crown. The pigeon tower, with its egg-replacement birth control and its compostable droppings, is on land whose original kin relations were broken by settlement. However, Haraway claims that the pigeon tower is an example of being accountable for who have been displaced so that present collaborations can occur. It contrasts the exploitative, singular use of the land that previously separated and alienated kin. The chapter indicates that people have the responsibility to engage in interactive, exploratory ventures that mutually improve both parties or species involved.