LIT Review # 3 - Making Kin

Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6, no. 1 (May 1, 2015): 159–65. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615934.

In this article, Donna Haraway, a prominent American scholar known for her contributions to science and technology studies, feminist theory, and posthumanism, calls for a radical rethinking of kinship with her provocative slogan: “Make kin, not babies!”

Haraway highlights the deep scales of planetary change, reminding us that Earth’s systems have been radically transformed by nonhuman forces long before humans emerged. She points to the spread of seed-dispersing plants millions of years before the rise of agriculture as an example of how nonhuman agents have fundamentally reshaped the planet.[1] In my own practice, the focus has been on the Piako Swamp. This ancient landscape was profoundly altered by ecological upheaval following the Taupō eruption over 20,000 years ago, triggering widespread erosion and sedimentation, which in turn redirected Aotearoa New Zealand’s longest river, the Waikato. Once flowing through the swamp toward the Hauraki Gulf, the river shifted westward to its current course into the Tasman Sea. This dramatic change led to the formation of the Piako and Waihou Rivers, shaping the swamp’s distinct ecological identity. It was into this transformed environment that Polynesian navigators and then colonial settlers arrived centuries later.[2]

However, anthropogenic processes, human-driven activities such as agriculture, have undeniably exerted significant and lasting effects on the planet. Haraway does not discount the role of abiotic actors, acknowledging instead the complex entanglements in which both organic species and abiotic elements co-produce the conditions of planetary change. Her perspective emphasises multispecies and more-than-human assemblages, where agency and responsibility are distributed across a network of human and nonhuman actors.

“No species, not even our own arrogant one pretending to be good individuals in so-called modern Western scripts, acts alone; assemblages of organic species and of abiotic actors make history, the evolutionary kind and other kinds too.”[3]

Abiotic actors are other-than-human entities, physical but non-living forces such as minerals, weather systems, or geological formations. While not alive in a biological sense, they are neither inert nor sterile; rather, they actively participate in shaping ecological and material realities. Their relationship with human-facilitated phenomena is not merely one of passive interaction but of intra-action, which highlights the mutually constitutive nature of relationships. [4] In this view, abiotic and biotic agents do not exist independently and then interact; instead, they emerge through their entanglements with each other, co-producing the conditions of existence.

Timothy Morton, professor at Rice University in Houston, talks about ecological interdependence, “This is what most of us mean when we think ecologically: Everything is connected to everything else.” He continues “You drive and fly using crushed liquefied dinosaur bones. You are walking on hills and mountains of fossilized animal bits. Most of the dust in your house is skin.”[5]

Closer to home, Dr Emmy Rākete (Ngāpuhi, Te Rarawa) is a communist and prison abolitionist from Tāmaki Makaurau. Rākete writes “sitting on the beach as a young girl, I picked a squirming insect from my scalp and watched in horror as my own blood leaked out of its crushed body”, and she is realising we are in Papatūānuku (the earth mother) - “parasites are in us, and we are in them.”[6] Because everything is interconnected, I’m interested in the harm caused when natural environments are disrupted. From a human-centric viewpoint, we often pursue a single idea of progress, overlooking or failing to understand the broader consequences for the complex web of life we are part of. In the case of the Piako Swamp, two key forces shaped the push for drainage of the swamp: a shortage of flat land for new settlers, and the prevailing belief that wetlands were wasted spaces, waiting to be transformed into productive farmland. Due to this narrow thinking, the original wetland ecosystems, including forests, bogs, and kahikatea forests, were largely destroyed during the drainage and agricultural development processes. 

Haraway poses a critical question: are we at an inflection point of such consequence that it threatens the continuation of life on Earth for all beings - human and nonhuman alike? She argues that we are confronting a convergence of crises marked by “extraordinary burdens of toxic chemistry, mining, depletion of lakes and rivers under and above ground, ecosystem simplification, and vast genocides of people and other critters.”[7] These interlinked processes, driven largely by extractive capitalism and anthropocentric systems of domination, are accelerating towards potential systemic collapses, ecological, social, and geological, from which recovery may no longer be possible.

Haraway draws on Anna Tsing’s concept of refugia, pockets of ecological and cultural resilience, as critical to understanding the gravity of our current moment. Tsing suggests that the true inflection point may not simply be widespread destruction, but rather the elimination of these refugia: the remaining spaces from which multispecies assemblages might re-emerge and reconstitute themselves after catastrophic events. “Anna Tsing argues that the Holocene was the long period when refugia, places of refuge, still existed, even abounded, to sustain reworlding in rich cultural and biological diversity.”[8] The transformation of the Hauraki Plains, once the Piako Swamp, has been so extensive that reversing the changes and returning the land to its original swampy state now seems highly unlikely, if not impossible. In my practice, I am asking whether the Hauraki Plains can still be considered a place of refuge. Has this place lost its capacity to reworld? Artist Anselm Kiefer may be asking the same question. In writing about Kiefer’s 2009 exhibition at White Cube in London, Simon Schama describes Kiefer’s work as having “taken an ecological turn, inflected with planetary pathos. … resembling satellite images of deforested silted estuaries – places where human culture began and where its end might be heralded by ecological self-strangulation.”[9]

Haraway’s theory, shared by other critical thinkers, is that the Anthropocene should be understood less as a geological epoch and more as a boundary event: a threshold moment marking the end of one kind of world and the uncertain emergence of another. Haraway urges us to “cultivate with each other in every way imaginable epochs to come that replenish refuge”, emphasising collaborative, multispecies efforts to restore the refugia necessary for sustaining life.[10] Haraway argues that ‘ongoingness’, the continued flourishing of life on Earth, requires commitment and collaboration with “multispecies assemblages which include people.”[11]

Haraway goes further by proposing a new term, Chthulucene, to describe the past, present, and possible futures shaped through multispecies entanglement. In this vision, humans are not separate from or above nature, but entangled participants in a shared world whose survival depends on mutual care, responsibility, and imaginative reworlding.[12] Haraway explains that the name Chthulucene embodies a convergence of diverse, global powers, forces of becoming, regeneration, and interconnection. It draws from mythologies and cosmologies around the world, including figures like Gaia (Greek), Nāga (South and Southeast Asian), and, closer to home, Tangaroa, the Māori atua (god) of the sea. Tangaroa is the son of Ranginui (the sky father) and Papatūānuku (the earth mother), part of a rich cosmology that places kinship and relationality at the heart of existence.[13]

Haraway emphasises the cultural, spiritual, and ecological ties that bind human and non-human life, and she calls for ways of thinking and living that honour these connections in the face of planetary crisis. She acknowledges the profound scale of ongoing loss, “there are so many losses already, and there will be many more”, and recognises that some of these losses are irreversible.[14] In response, Haraway calls for collective action and responsibility, insisting on the urgent need to cultivate and preserve refugia, places of shelter and resilience, from which multispecies assemblages might re-emerge and reconfigure. She warns that irreversible destruction is already underway, impacting millions of human lives as well as countless other-than-human beings, and presses us to act in solidarity to support the possibility of ongoingness for all life. “We need to make-with – become-with, compose-with – the earthbound.” [15]

Haraway proposes the provocative slogan “Make kin, not babies” as a call to reimagine relationships in the face of ecological and social crises. This phrase encapsulates her vision for multispecies ecojustice, urging a shift away from traditional, lineage-based understandings of kinship and towards inclusive cross-species forms of care and responsibility. Haraway places particular emphasis on feminist leadership in this reconfiguration, advocating for the active unravelling and reweaving of the conceptual ties between genealogy and kin, and between kin and other species. In doing so, she encourages solidarity and connection that stretch across species boundaries and prioritise the flourishing of all life forms.[16]

With a touch of apt humour, Haraway suggests that a more fitting name for the Anthropocene might be “The Dithering”, a phrase she borrows from Kim Stanley Robinson’s science fiction novel 2312. “The Dithering will be written into earth’s rocky strata, indeed is already written into earth’s mineralized layers.”[17]

To expand our understanding of kinship, Haraway engages with Shakespeare’s nuanced use of the words kin and kind, noting that “the kindest were not necessarily kin as family.”[18] She emphasises that all earthlings are kin, and asserts that it is long overdue to cultivate more responsible and compassionate care, not as isolated species, but as interconnected assemblages. This perspective is at the heart of my art practice: nurturing a sense of care and responsibility for all forms of life. It involves making choices that honour the integrity of entire ecological systems, not just human needs, and resisting decisions driven solely by profit or economic logic. In the case of the Piako Swamp assemblage, this includes acknowledging the Māori communities, the rivers, the birds, the trees, the eels, the fish, and the rich web of soil life, a vital network that supports plant growth, breaks down organic matter, recycles nutrients, and sustains the structure and health.

Inspired by Donna Haraway’s slogan, I ask if “Make kin, make kind” is more apt? It challenges us to foster not only bonds but also compassion and care, recognising that our survival depends on nurturing multispecies communities, rather than focusing on one species at a time. In practicing kindness alongside kinship, we take meaningful steps toward a more just and sustainable future.