Lynn Margulis was an evolutionary biologist who studied microbial evolution and organelle heredity at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She developed the theory of symbiogenesis—the claim that new kinds of cells, tissues, organs, and species evolve primarily through the long-lasting fusion of genomes among bacteria and archaea, with mutation playing only a modest role. It posits interconnected development rather than singular, disconnected evolution. Her 1967 paper proposing that the modern complex cell originates through bacterial symbiosis was rejected many times before publication; with James Lovelock, she went on to develop Gaia theory.

Haraway features Margulis to ground the biological claim that runs through Chapter 3 and the book as a whole: Nothing makes itself. Margulis’s exemplar was Mixotricha paradoxa, a protist living in the gut of an Australian termite that turned out to consist of at least five distinct kinds of cells with their own genomes. The point of the example is that what looks like one organism is already a sympoietic assembly of other organisms. Haraway extends Margulis’s vocabulary into her own term, “holobionts,” naming “critters” as knots of relations rather than units that subsequently interact.

The choice to feature Margulis also lets Haraway position her argument within a specific scientific lineage rather than against science. The early-20th-century work of Konstantin Mereschkowsky predates her work, and her contemporaries Scott Gilbert, Jan Sapp, and Alfred Tauber extend it in their paper “We Have Never Been Individuals.” Haraway uses Margulis to mark a friction with modern synthesis, a widely accepted framework combining Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory and Gregor Mendel’s theories on heredity, which still treats bounded units in competition as the basic explanatory frame. Margulis loved bacteria and archaea above all else, Haraway notes, and felt that they had already done most of the inventing. The affection is part of the science, from Haraway’s perspective.

Vinciane Despret is a Belgian philosopher, psychologist, and ethologist whose fieldwork tracks how scientists and animals render each other “capable,” or mutually develop and improve one another, in actual encounters. Chapter 7 is built around her work, and she also co-fabulated the Camille stories with Haraway and Fabrizio Terranova at Isabelle Stengers’s 2013 Cerisy colloquium.

Two field studies anchor Haraway’s account. With ornithologist Amotz Zahavi in the Negev desert, Despret encountered Arabian babblers who appeared to dance together at sunrise, exchange gifts, and care for one another’s nestlings in ways that contrasted typical accounts of altruism. Despret showed that what scientists do in the field shapes how animals see themselves being seen and thus what they do back. With sociologist Jocelyne Porcher among French nonindustrial cattle and pig breeders, she developed the term “anthropo-zoo-genesis” to describe how farmers and their animals change and create subjective interpretations of one another through daily labor and conversation.

Haraway features Despret because Despret offers a method that fits the book’s commitments. Despret’s “virtue of politeness” acknowledges the possibility that beings have not yet shown all of what they can do and that their true potential can be discovered through well-intentioned connection and kinship with them (127). This gives Haraway a working model for “becoming-with” that refuses both reduction and projection. Creatures’ worlds enlarge by addition to another’s, not subtraction from them. The babblers and their scientists, the cows and their breeders, become new or operate in ways that did not exist before the encounter.

Isabelle Stengers is a Belgian philosopher of science trained in chemistry, a scholar of Whitehead and Deleuze, and Despret’s frequent collaborator on Women Who Make a Fuss. Her cosmopolitics, her account of the ecology of practices, and her framing of Gaia, or earth, as an intrusive force structure several of the book’s central moves.

Haraway features Stengers to do work that no other thinker in the book quite does. Where Bruno Latour proposes “geostories” and Earthbound trials of strength, Stengers names Gaia as something that intrudes on thought itself, refusing both the role of nursing mother and the role of a mere resource. The figure is materialist and systemic rather than mythological; Stengers inherits it from Lovelock and Margulis but pushes it toward a question about response.

Two further Stengers contributions matter. Co-written with Philippe Pignarre, La sorcellerie capitaliste argues that denunciation has been singularly ineffective against capitalism and that on-the-ground collectives capable of inventing new practices of imagination, resistance, and mourning offer a more honest path. Haraway uses this to refuse both apocalyptic resignation and self-congratulatory critique. Stengers’s cosmopolitics—the demand that decisions take place in the presence of those who will bear their consequences—supplies the political grammar of the Camille stories, where reproductive choice carries ramifications across five generations and many species. Stengers is also the host who convened the Cerisy workshop that produced Camille, which means that her influence on the book is structural as well as conceptual.

Anna Tsing is an anthropologist whose ethnography of matsutake mushrooms follows Japanese, American, Chinese, Korean, Hmong, Lao, and Mexican pickers; mycorrhizal mats; oak and pine forests; buyers; shippers; and DNA sequencers across what she calls patchy capitalism and salvage accumulation. The Mushroom at the End of the World and the conference she organized with Nils Bubandt at Aarhus on the arts of living on a damaged planet inform several of Haraway’s central arguments.

Haraway features Tsing for two reasons. First, Tsing demonstrates a way of doing fieldwork that refuses to look away from the ruins or to abstract them into a single causative system like Capitalism or the Anthropos. Second, Tsing supplies the conceptual hinge for Chapter 4’s argument about naming. In “Feral Biologies,” she proposes that the inflection point between the Holocene and the Anthropocene is the destruction of refugia—the places of refuge from which diverse species assemblages could be reconstituted after disturbance. Haraway adopts the framing directly. Refugia, not climate alone, is what the present epoch is annihilating and what the Communities of Compost in Chapter 8 work to rebuild on ruined land.

Tsing is also Haraway’s closest companion in the book’s storytelling argument. Her phrase “worlds worth fighting for” returns at the close of Chapter 3 (97), and her insistence on the force of stories—that it matters which stories tell stories—runs alongside Haraway’s SF practice throughout. Where Margulis grounds the biology and Despret grounds the method, Tsing grounds the ethnographic claims that the precarious systems in which the world operates can be strengthened through an intentionally cultivated—if contaminated—diversity of connection and practice.

Bruno Latour is a French sociologist of science whose Gifford Lectures on Gaia, writings on the Earthbound, and reading of Carl Schmitt’s political theology Haraway engages in Chapter 2. She shares his rejection of “god tricks,” meaning the idea that some higher power of religion, science, or history will save humanity from its troubles, as well as his commitment to composing a common world bit by bit through situated practices.

Haraway features Latour to think with and against. With him, she rejects denunciation and the modernist purification of nature and society. She affirms his Gaia stories, or geostories, which tell the stories of life on earth without appealing to the need to assign it a plot devised by a higher power, as many religions might. Those who reject these predetermined narratives and refuse to separate society from nature are “Earthbound.” However, Haraway disagrees with Latour’s reliance on Schmittian trials of strength and the figure of the “hostis,” the worthy enemy, as the only honest means to confront the crises at hand. Haraway argues that this remains the old hero’s tale and that it cannot do the work the present needs. The disagreement carries a methodological lesson that runs through the book: The question of how one thinks shapes what becomes thinkable, and a stronger story sometimes requires a different, more integrative approach.

Beatriz da Costa was an artist-researcher at the University of California, Irvine. With students Cina Hazegh and Kevin Ponto and pigeon fancier Bob Matsuyama, she designed “PigeonBlog” in 2006, equipping racing pigeons with GPS units, GSM cell-phone communication, and CO/NOx sensors to gather and stream real-time air pollution data across Southern California. Designing the basic technology took roughly three months; making the pack small, comfortable, and safe enough for the birds took almost a year of building hands-on multispecies trust.

Haraway features PigeonBlog because it does what so much of the book argues for in compressed form. The project depended on a pigeon fancier’s knowledge and on the talented birds themselves. The artist-researchers (Haraway refuses to define them as one or the other) had to learn to interact with the pigeons under Matsuyama’s mentorship; the pigeons had to be trained to fly with packs without becoming anxious or being plucked from the air by an opportunistic falcon. The data produced were intended to provoke and inspire rather than substitute for professional air pollution science.

The question that da Costa posed in response to PETA’s effort to shut the project down—the rationale being that the work was not even scientifically grounded experimentation—gives Haraway a sharp formulation of her own argument that play, art, and non-instrumental collaboration can be sites of serious worldly response-ability. The American Racing Pigeon Union, by contrast, gave da Costa a Certificate of Appreciation.

Haraway also features PigeonBlog as a model of cross-class and cross-species coalition. Working-class pigeon trainers, art researchers, electronics, raptors, and air pollution itself were all participants. Da Costa died in 2012, and Haraway’s account doubles as remembrance.