Staying with the Trouble

Donna Haraway begins Staying with the Trouble by refusing both technological salvation and the fatalist declaration that ecological collapse has already made action meaningless. Her term “Chthulucene” redirects attention from an abstract, species-wide Humanity toward the tentacular relations through which humans and other beings live and die on a damaged earth. “Sympoiesis”—making-with rather than self-making—names the book’s central proposition: no organism, technology, community, or future is produced alone. Pigeons, coral reefs, Black Mesa sheep, pharmaceuticals, science fiction, and activist art become partners in an argument about cultivating response-ability inside compromised worlds.

This is a distinctly feminist intervention in environmental thought. Haraway contests the sovereign, self-sufficient subject inherited by liberal politics and replaces it with situated beings indebted to uneven histories of colonialism, plantation, capital, science, and care. “Making kin” therefore does not mean sentimental harmony with nature or a simple expansion of the biological family. It asks which relations sustain livable worlds, who bears the work of maintaining them, and how kinship might be built across species and generations without fantasies of purity. Her proliferating meaning of “SF”—science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, string figures—also makes storytelling a method for redistributing what futures can be perceived.

Haraway’s dense metaphors can inspire without specifying institutions, budgets, or strategies, and critics may reasonably want a more direct account of political economy and environmental inequality. The book should not replace Indigenous land politics, climate science, or movement histories. Read with those fields, however, it offers an unusually generative discipline: remain with damaged relations long enough to become accountable for them. For FemRes readers, its lasting contribution is to move ecofeminism beyond a fixed association of women with nature and toward collective world-making, where care is neither innocence nor rescue but the difficult practice of becoming capable of response.