Donna J. Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene is a work of feminist science studies and speculative theory that ranges across evolutionary biology, environmental activism, ethnography, and science fiction to argue for new ways of inhabiting a damaged earth. The book asks readers to cultivate “response-ability” (the practiced capacity to respond to others in mortal entanglement) in the present, in the company of human and other-than-human kin. Across eight chapters, the book builds three interlocking arguments: The Evolution of Nature in a Collective System, The Importance of Seeing Living Things as Kin, and Storytelling as a Tool for Living on a Damaged Planet.

This guide refers to the 2016 paperback edition published by Duke University Press.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of illness and animal cruelty and death.

Summary

Donna J. Haraway opens Staying With the Trouble by laying out three intertwined demands that organize the entire book: staying with the trouble of a damaged earth, making kin across species lines, and learning to inhabit what she names the “Chthulucene.” The term fuses Greek roots for the earthly (khthôn) and the freshly emerging (kainos), and Haraway offers it as an alternative to two reigning framings that she finds inadequate: the Anthropocene, which centers a generic “Man” and humanity’s impact on earth, and the “game over” cynicism of the Capitalocene that treats the catastrophic impact of capitalism as already total and fatal. Against both, she calls for situated, mortal, multispecies practices of “becoming-with,” or consciously connecting with all other things, on a wounded planet.

The Introduction also previews the recurring method that holds the book together: “SF,” which Haraway stretches to refer to science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, and “so far.” SF acts as both a guiding concept and a lens through which to view her work and nature. She previews the eight chapters to come, which discuss pigeons as guides, sympoiesis, four art-science activist projects, the provocation “Make Kin Not Babies” (2), the histories of the drugs DES and Premarin, and a closing speculative fabulation about a child named Camille.

Chapter 1 develops the SF method through string-figure games, drawing on Marilyn Strathern’s anthropology, Isabelle Stengers’s cosmopolitics, and Navajo na’atl’o’ string games oriented toward hózhó, a term for right relations of humans with the world. Haraway introduces the conceptual Terrapolis, a space for multispecies becoming-with, and reframes the human as guman or humus, metaphorically “composted” together with all other creatures, living and dead.

Pigeons supply the chapter’s working evidence. Haraway explores their homing capacities, the mirror self-recognition demonstrated in B. F. Skinner’s lab and Shigeru Watanabe’s Keio University research, and Project Sea Hunt’s accuracy at spotting castaways. This sets up a discussion of artist Beatriz da Costa’s “PigeonBlog,” in which racing pigeons fitted with GPS and pollution sensors collaborated with pigeon fancier Bob Matsuyama to help analyze and publicize air pollution levels. Other examples of integrated pigeon housing in urban spaces represent Haraway’s point on interspecies recognition, alliances, and unity, rather than a human-centric interpretation of the world.

Chapter 2 turns to “tentacular thinking.” Taking the redwood spider Pimoa cthulhu as her emblem, Haraway argues for the Chthulucene over the Anthropocene, distinguishing life lived along entangled, earthly lines rather than dictated by one supposedly superior species. She draws on M. Beth Dempster’s distinction between sympoietic systems (collectively producing, without self-defined boundaries) and autopoietic ones (self-producing, isolated).

Haraway traces Hannah Arendt’s reading of Nazi Adolf Eichmann’s “thoughtlessness”; Anna Tsing’s matsutake ethnography of “salvage accumulation”; and Thom van Dooren’s book Flight Ways on whooping cranes, Hawaiian crows, and Sydney’s little penguins. Each of these promotes her theory of interconnected thought and, more broadly, relationships with one another, wherein grief, responsibility, and storytelling allow people to build more resilient and impactful structures for the future. She refers to Ursula K. Le Guin’s carrier-bag theory, which posits stories as bags in which we carry pieces of each other rather than literature as individualistic tales of heroism. Engaging philosopher and scientists Bruno Latour’s and Isabelle Stengers’s theories on Gaia, Haraway lists eight objections to the Anthropocene, prefers the Capitalocene, and arrives finally at the Chthulucene. She emphasizes her point through analysis on Medusa, Potnia Theron, corals, and octopuses.

Chapter 3 builds the biological case for “sympoiesis”—or “making-with,” as all things contribute to the creation of one another—through the symbiogenetic work of Lynn Margulis, who argued that new cells, tissues, and species evolve through the fusion of bacterial and archaeal genomes. Margulis’s exemplar was Mixotricha paradoxa, a protist in an Australian termite gut composed of at least five taxonomic kinds of cells. Haraway adopts the term “holobionts,” after Scott Gilbert, Jan Sapp, and Alfred Tauber, for symbiotic assemblages where all living things in nature impact one another. She gathers further support from Nicole King’s choanoflagellate work, Margaret McFall-Ngai and Ned Ruby’s Hawaiian bobtail squid and Vibrio fischeri studies, and Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers’s “involutionary momentum” rereading of Charles Darwin’s work on bees and orchids.

The chapter then turns to four “science art activist worldings” (71): The Crochet Coral Reef of Margaret and Christine Wertheim; the Madagascar Ako Project of Alison Jolly and Hantanirina Rasamimanana; the Inupiat video game Never Alone; and Navajo-Churro sheep restoration on Black Mesa, including the Black Mesa Water Coalition’s Just Transition work toward hózhó. These all blend disciplines and species to present a sympoietic world.

Chapter 4 continues weighing competing names for the present rupture: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, and Chthulucene. The decisive issues, she argues, are scale, rate, synchronicity, and complexity. Drawing on Anna Tsing’s essay “Feral Biologies,” she locates a turning point in the destruction of refugia, or environments supporting isolated and dying species; she furthers this with Jason Moore’s claim that “cheap nature” is exhausted and that capitalist exploitation is pushing nature beyond what it can recover from. Treating the Anthropocene as a boundary event to be made short, she issues the chapter’s blunt provocation, “Make Kin Not Babies!” (102). She redefines “kin” beyond genealogy or immediate family as a lateral, tentacular, multispecies relation: “oddkin.”

Chapter 5 uses Haraway’s personal experiences to further explore her arguments. Her aging dog Cayenne was prescribed the synthetic estrogen DES for urinary incontinence after a heart condition ruled out the alternative drug PPA. From this household scene, Haraway traces DES backward to its 1938 synthesis at Oxford and forward through its prescription to roughly 2 million pregnant US women between 1940 and 1971, despite a 1950s University of Chicago double-blind study showing no benefit. A New England Journal of Medicine report tied DES to vaginal clear cell adenocarcinoma in DES daughters. From 1954 into the early 1970s, the same drug also drove cattle growth promotion through Iowa State and Purdue research.

A second thread follows Premarin, conjugated estrogens extracted from pregnant mares’ urine on Canadian farms, marketed by Ayerst from 1941. By 1997, it was the top-prescribed US drug; the 2002 Women’s Health Initiative findings exposed cardiovascular and cancer risks. HorseAid activism for exploited and mistreated horses beginning in 1986 forced reforms documented by the North American Equine Ranching Information Council. Haraway acknowledges her own earlier ignorance of the mares’ conditions while using estrogen amid her menopause. She frames shame as a prod toward accountability across species, farmers, and ecologies. She calls this obligation “response-ability,” changed from “responsibility” to include an ability to act and connect beyond the initial incident.

Chapter 6 returns to Le Guin’s “carrier-bag theory of fiction” (118). Haraway reads Le Guin’s “The Author of the Acacia Seeds,” in which fictional therolinguists puzzle over an ant’s script written on de-germinated acacia seeds, and pushes back on their conclusion that plants merely make “art.” The fictional ant and seed are bound by a real biological mutualism: Pseudomyrmex ants disperse acacia seeds in exchange for fat-rich elaiosomes, while Central American acacias provide hollow stipule shelters and Beltian food bodies, and Kenyan whistling thorn acacias house Crematogaster mimosae as bodyguards. Octavia Butler’s Lauren Oya Olamina and the Earthseed religion of Parable of the Sower supply a second carrier-bag model for the Chthulucene “ongoingness,” wherein multispecies collaboration that embraces the living and the dead build a long-lasting culture.

Chapter 7 develops a “curious practice” through the work of Belgian philosopher and ethologist Vinciane Despret, who insists that “thinking-with” other beings requires the “virtue of politeness” (127): holding open the possibility that beings render each other more capable through positive encounters with one another. Despret’s fieldwork with ornithologist Amotz Zahavi among Negev desert Arabian babblers shows scientists and birds mutually shaping observation. Her collaboration with sociologist Jocelyne Porcher among French nonindustrial cattle and pig breeders elaborates “anthropo-zoo-genesis,” in which farmers and animals work together by addition. Through Stengers and Despret’s Women Who Make a Fuss, the parable of the 12 camels, and Matali Crasset’s pigeon loft Capsule, Haraway frames inheritance, commemoration, and curiosity as practices that cultivate multispecies response-ability.

The book closes with the speculative Camille stories in Chapter 8. Haraway recounts a writing exercise from Isabelle Stengers’s 2013 Cerisy colloquium on gestes spéculatifs, where she, filmmaker Fabrizio Terranova, and Despret were asked to write a story about a baby and continue it through five human generations. Their child, Camille, becomes the prototype for what Haraway calls the Children of Compost, exemplars of “sym fiction.” The story imagines the Communities of Compost settling in ruined places such as the mountaintop-removal lands along West Virginia’s Kanawha River, combatting a period of widespread ineffectiveness and fatalism about war, climate change, and capitalist impact called the “Great Dithering.”

Each new child in these communities requires at least three parents, and the gestational parent exercises reproductive freedom by selecting an animal symbiont from a threatened migratory species. A few genes and microorganisms from that animal are added to the child, while the animal itself remains unmodified. Camille 1, born in 2025, is bonded to North American monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) and their imperiled milkweed corridors.

Across five Camilles spanning 2025 to 2425, human numbers fall from 10 billion to 3 billion. Camille 2 encounters Mazahua women of El Ejército de Mujeres Zapatistas en Defensa del Agua and learns “symanimagenesis,” a kinship with the dead. After viral disease extinguishes the monarchs entirely, Camille 4 and 5 train as Speakers for the Dead, drawing on Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq’s Animism and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s “multinaturalism.” The book closes with this fabulation, ending with the Children of Compost and the unfinished work of staying with a troubled world to create a more flourishing future.