The piece by Gilbert is very effective in advancing the “more-than-humanities” methodology from a scientific perspective. The fact that we literally cannot consider humans as distinct entities from non-humans is profound in shaping how we conceptualize our relationship with the environment. Our discussions of sympoeisis and autopoeisis made me realize that nothing in the universe truly exists alone. Even sand exists as a sympoetic system. When it flows, the movement of each grain influences those around it and is further influenced by outside factors such as the wind. Perhaps this idea of sympoeisis could be leveraged to encourage people to adopt greater empathy for the non-human world, or at the very least view its survival as necessary to the survival of humans in the face of climate change. I also like how Harraway rejects the idea of the Anthropocene, even though that is the widely adopted term these days used to describe the era of global warming. After reading her piece, I do feel like the Anthropocene is too human-centered and fails to acknowledge the multispecies entanglement and human-environment relationships that shape climate change. These pieces raise questions of not just how we can change how we “manage” environments like the Columbia River and the Bering Strait, but rather change how we live with and within them, as just one of many actors intertwined in the larger web of the Chthulucene. This also applies to our relationship with non-living entities, such as mountains and glaciers. As McPhee describes, the mountains in Los Angeles were far from mere static backdrops in the lives of the residents who lived on or near them. They were geological agents in their own right, and a refusal to view them as such is a form of hubris rooted in anthropocentric thinking. Mark Carey’s work on the Third Pole similarly expands our understanding of more-than-human entanglements. His analysis of glacial melt due to climate change in the Arctic, Antarctic, and Himalayas region links geophysical phenomena with local human consequences, and vice versa. The mountains here are not merely scenic or symbolic—they are active participants in global climate systems. This idea is emphasized by Professor Bester’s lecture, which in its own way gives agency to non-living entities - sand, in this case. Something that we barely give a second thought to in our everyday lives is far more complex and “organic” than we realize, which forces us to stop and really think about the intricacies of the inorganic world. On a broader scale, the problem, then, is not simply about expanding empathy or including more voices in our telling of environmental history and climate change, but about fundamentally reconstructing our outlook on nature: seeing mountains, microbes, and glaciers as co-actors in shared histories and climate futures.