Coming of Age at the End of Nature, offers a collaboration of stories from authors not much older than our cohort, detailing their experiences “coming of age at the end of nature.” What does it mean to come of age at the end of nature? This question caused me to reflect on my own experience growing up with a certain social construction of nature and the different experience of someone half my age in the same situation. I can’t be completely sure what is the world changing and what is my own understanding developing, but the nature I experienced growing up is different from the nature my parents experienced and will differ from what youth after me will experience. The world that was presented to me with distant risk and fear narratives surrounding discussions on species extinction and habitat destruction seems to me to be at a peak. I can always remember being told certain species would disappear in my lifetime and seeing it happening so rapidly is hard to wrap my mind around. The rhetoric is now or never with certain conservation efforts. We are in the midst of the sixth great extinction event, cities around the world are running out of water, and the global political economic climate is slowly but surely ticking closer to midnight on the Doomsday clock (Bulletin of Atomic Scientists). How these narratives of the disintegrating ecosystem persist will affect future approaches to environmentalism and nature. We discussed in class the idea that the present may be a pivotal moment in history and I want to believe that is true. Listening to progressive parents offering their children agency, critical thought, and an accurate, equitable approach to knowledge gives me hope that this “end to nature” will give rise to a new beginning as well.