\u201cWorld Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After\u201d by Martha Park, Hub City Press, 240 pages.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard to say something new about a bird that\u2019s likely been extinct for over 80 years, especially one like the ivory-billed woodpecker \u2014\u00a0a species that has generated its own cottage industry of books, essays, scientific surveys and conspiracy theories since its last universally accepted sighting back in 1944.<\/p>\n
But in \u201cWorld Without End,\u201d Martha Park’s debut collection of essays exploring the intersections of the climate crisis and faith, Park adds a fresh twist to the ivory-billed saga.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s interested in the religious overtones of the bird\u2019s many nicknames: the Good Lord Bird (for the exclamatory disbelief purportedly expressed upon seeing the woodpecker\u2019s enormity), the Grail Bird (after the passion some birders have to prove its continued existence) and the Lazarus Bird (because now the poor thing won\u2019t stay dead).<\/p>\n
Park offers up the more nuanced and no less biblical \u201cresurrection creature,\u201d for a bird that once depended on forests of newly dead trees, their trunks easily permeable and grub-laden, for shelter and subsistence. It\u2019s too bad, she reasons, that the ivory-billed woodpecker disappeared during this era of increased logging, saltwater incursion and hurricanes.<\/p>\n
More dead trees would have made the species among \u201cthe perfect creatures for our time, at home in a world of change and disruption,” she writes.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cWorld Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After\u201d by Martha Park, Hub City Press, 240 pages.<\/p>\n
PROVIDED PHOTO<\/p>\n
You might, like me, own a sagging shelf of books on the Anthropocene age, the term for the past century of devastating human-induced environmental impact. This makes me a doom-reader, sure, and, I\u2019d contend, a well-informed realist. After a decade-plus of focused reading, I can\u2019t help but feel a bit jaded. Another book, the gloomily benumbed reader asks, about dead birds, melting ice caps, climate refugees, so on and so forth? (Full disclosure: I\u2019ve written one myself).<\/p>\n
But in these echo-chambered times, \u201cWorld Without End\u201d is a much-needed palliative.<\/p>\n
Atheists and agnostics are true believers when it comes to the climate crisis. Though, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey, only 8% of Americans identify as both \u201chighly religious\u201d and \u201cvery concerned about climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n
Park, the Memphis-based essayist, is the daughter of an itinerant Methodist pastor, now retired, who uprooted his family every three or four years.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhenever we moved,\u201d she writes, \u201cone group of white-haired ladies was replaced by another, all singing the same songs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her father\u2019s politics skewed progressive. Parishioners at times called him a socialist, accused him of not believing in Jesus. He refused to preach from the Book of Revelation for its apocalyptic bent and made his young daughter listen to Rush Limbaugh, that bloviating mouthpiece of political doomsayerism, so she \u201cwould know what the enemy was saying.\u201d<\/p>\n
So, perhaps, Park was destined to begin her writing career, literally and figuratively, at the world\u2019s end.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith increasing frequency,\u201d she writes, \u201cI\u2019ve found the language of apocalypse creeping up in my own life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still several years away from turning 40, her retirement plans \u201cconsist entirely of assuming the world will no longer be habitable by the time I\u2019m sixty-five.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most of the book\u2019s dozen essays have been assembled from various print and online publications, which can, at times, give \u201cWorld Without End\u201d a cobbled-together feel. The collection\u2019s saving grace is a third through line that threads across many of these pieces: Park\u2019s impending motherhood.<\/p>\n
The birth of a child marks any number of beginnings but also represents its own, distinct world without end \u2014\u00a0a constant seesaw of rapturous moments and tiny apocalypses that can send even the most non-spiritual parent to their knees in thanks.<\/p>\n
Bunkered down during the pandemic, a pregnant Park and her husband binge-watched \u201cDoomsday Preppers\u201d and the survivalist series \u201cAlone,\u201d then reluctantly begin stockpiling their own survival kits. The apocalyptic impulse, she reflects, is a constant, especially in Christian thought. The fifth-century theologian known as St. Augustine compared his world with that of Christ\u2019s earliest followers: \u201cThose were the last days then; how much more so now!\u201d<\/p>\n
In other essays, Park hits the road, searching her environs for end-times fun.<\/p>\n
In Dayton, Tennessee, she attends the annual reenactment of the Scopes Monkey Trial, an American Waterloo for an earlier evolutionary stage in Christian fundamentalism. She ponders the reactionary binarism that then pitted creationists against Darwinists and today has led to the polarized decay of American politics.<\/p>\n
Christians, she reminds, \u201costensibly model their lives and values\u201d after a man who, above all else, contained multitudes: \u201cboth human and divine . . . dead and resurrected.\u201d<\/p>\n
Traveling to the Florida Panhandle, she unearths the story of Elvy Edison Callaway, who claimed that the site of the biblical Garden of Eden could be found along the Apalachicola River. Noah sourced the wood for his Ark from Torreya taxifolia, commonly known as Florida torreya or stinking-cedar, a species now listed as critically endangered due to a fungal blight.<\/p>\n
In Kentucky, she tours Ark Encounter, an amusement park for liturgical literalists and young-earth creationists centered on a full-size replica of Noah\u2019s biblical barge. The exhibit catalogs the 6,744 animals that humanity\u2019s O.G. prepper brought on board, including a pair of unicorns and several dozen dinosaur species, or in creationist parlance, \u201ckinds,\u201d the term that appears in Genesis.<\/p>\n
Despite denying climate change, the Ark Encounter’s parent organization, the Creation Museum, sued its insurance company for $1 million in damages due to unseasonably heavy rains in 2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere never was a more holy age than ours,\u201d writes Annie Dillard, a notable influence on Park, \u201cand never a less.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite its often bleak perspective, \u201cWorld Without End\u201d is a spirit-buoying book. I\u2019m excited to see where Park takes her readers next.<\/p>\n
Rien Fertel is the author of four books, including, most recently, \u201cBrown Pelican.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWorld Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After\u201d by Martha Park, Hub City Press, 240 pages. It\u2019s hard…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":90729,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-90728","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90728"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90728\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}