Julie Dunlap - Coming of Age at the End of Nature: A Generation Faces Living on a Changed Planet

Praise for Coming of Age at the End of Nature

Though they did little to create the planetary pickle were in, these young writers and thinkers embody the optimism, determination, and courage well need to get out of it.

Chip Giller, founder of Grist

Ignore this book at your peril! Coming of Age at the End of Nature is a stunning collection from young writers who have grown up with environmental crisis and the disruption and danger of climate change. These powerful new voices disturb our traditional notions of wilderness and wandering through sylvan scenes. In a world of suburban sprawl, urban blight, and glittering neon consumerism, they redefine how we look at nature and ourselves.

Robert Musil, president of the Rachel Carson Council and author of Washington in Spring: A Nature Journal for a Changing Capital

Coming of Age at the End of Nature is a gift of sanity and a revelation of wisdom. The resourcefulness filling these pages reclaims the root of the word meaning to rise again, recover. By answering for their lives with deep maturity, responsibility, and adaptability, these young writers ask us as readers to answer for our own. You will not find elegies here but clear, provocative insights that reveal the circumstances and contexts in which we all exist in relation to each other and the world we inhabit. It is a privilege to read and learn from this wonderful book, which calls on me to hold to what is difficult and necessary as well as beautiful.

Lauret Savoy, author of Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape

Coming of Age at the End of Nature is an important book. Not important because it contains a set of beautifully imagined and deeply thoughtful and lovingly written essaysthough it does. Not important because we, all of us, live in a time of great and uneasy change, and we badly need beautifully imagined, deeply thoughtful, and lovingly written essays in the same way we need clean air and water, meaningful climate legislation, and bold leadershipthough we do. It is an important book because it embodies the experiences, dreams, thoughts, fears, righteous anger, joy, and ultimately the audacious moral fiber of the generation now coming of age in the dangerous and degraded world, a world that we created and they now inherit.

Michael Nelson, coeditor of Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril

Coming of Age at the End of Nature is a must-read for anyone whos interested in engaging the next generation of conversation leadership. And we all should be very interested in engaging the next generation of conservation leadership. Relevancy is a critical issue for this movement. This book is a window into how young people think about and connect to the environment in their daily lives.

Sarah Milligan-Toffler, executive director of the Children and Nature Network

Published by Trinity University Press

San Antonio, Texas 78212

Copyright 2016 by Julie Dunlap and Susan A. Cohen

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover illustration and design by Sarah Cooper

Book design by BookMatters

ISBN-13 978-1-59534-778-7 ebook

Trinity University Press strives to produce its books using methods and materials in an environmentally sensitive manner. We favor working with manufacturers that practice sustainable management of all natural resources, produce paper using recycled stock, and manage forests with the best possible practices for people, biodiversity, and sustainability. The press is a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit program dedicated to supporting publishers in their efforts to reduce their impacts on endangered forests, climate change, and forest-dependent communities.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI 39.481992.

CIP data on file at the Library of Congress

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Table of Contents

Contents

Bill McKibben

Blair Braverman

Elizabeth Cooke

Ben Goldfarb

Lisa Hupp

Amaris Ketcham

Abby McBride

James Orbesen

Jason M. Brown

Cameron Conaway

Amy Coplen

Craig A. Maier

Lauren McCrady

Alycia Parnell

William Thomas

Amelia Urry

Ben Cromwell

Sierra Dickey

CJ Goulding

Bonnie Frye Hemphill

Megan Kimble

Emily Schosid

Danna Joy Staaf

BILL McKIBBEN

To say that this book is a particular delight for me would be an understatement. I wrote The End of Nature when I was twenty-seven, and when I go back to read it now some parts seem jejune. Thats not true of the writing in Coming of Age at the End of Nature, which is mature, reflective, deep, and lovely. It makes me hopeful.

Which is, of course, a certain irony, because in the intervening three decades much has happened to relieve us of hope, as many of these commentators make clear. What was an abstract fear of climate change in the late 1980s is, by the middle 2010s, a crisis so deep its possible to argue that weve simply waited too long to get started. I dont quite believe that, which is why I spend my life as one in a great army of activistsa movement ably limned in these pages. There are people in this book Ive linked arms with in nonviolent protests or worked with on crucial projects; there are, happily, many more Ive encountered only through their wordsproof of how big and broad the new environmentalism is.

Ive been consciously backing off from formal leadership in that movement for some years now, mostly to open the way for young people who will be fighting this fight until theyre my age or beyond. The passion and insight in these pages give me hope, as always, that the fight will keep growing, encompassing more and different kinds of people, finding new openings to the hearts and souls of our fellow human beings.

But Im also heartened by the sheer, dogged commitment to observing the world in all its beauty, even as that beauty is compromised. The planet we were given will never be more intact or whole than it is at this moment, and one of our jobs as human beings (and surely as writers) is simply to bear witness to it in all its glory, mystery, buzzing cruelty.

I am so grateful to the writers in this book and to the thought that I am part of their company of observers, thinkers, doers. The world is in a tough place, but it doesnt lack for witnesses and partisans!

How has growing up in a mutable physical, biological, and social world shaped the lives and thoughts of todays young adults? What do members of this generation have to say about their challenges, hopes, fears, and sources of resilience for the unpredictable future? Shrinking Arctic ice caps and healing ozone holes, dwindling biodiversity and expanding environmental education, ocean acidification and advancing global monitoring technology, and intransigent climate change denial amid burgeoning climate activism have been formative realities in their early lives. The essays collected here are composed by a particular set of insightful young adults: talented writers belonging to a generation that grew to maturity inundated with news and personal experiences of unprecedented environmental change. Together, they attempt to answer what it meansto themto come of age in a time of shifting expectations and environmental crisis.