World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After
By Martha Park
Hub City Press | 2025 | 240 pages
Lately, it has felt “almost impossible to be present to a changing world without knowing how this story will end,” writes Martha Park in her debut collection of essays, World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After. Writing from across her Southern landscape, Park works to resist climate narratives that foretell apocalypse, as she turns away from stories of buoyant hope and optimism. What does it mean, she invites us to consider, to love a changing world from a place of doubt and uncertainty?
The arrival of these other worlds—and the stories we tell ourselves and each other about them—guides Park’s readers through her woven and layered book, at once vulnerable, bold, and open-hearted. Across 12 essays, each paired with one of Park’s vibrant illustrations, she explores how our beliefs about the world intersect our changing landscapes in ways that are uncertain, contradictory, and shifting:
The apocalyptic visions heralded by climate change are decidedly not futuristic; they are unfolding right now. Another world is coming, one unlike anything we’ve ever seen, arriving every moment. It’s not on some other planet, or in some other time. It’s unfolding here, right now. Whenever a patch of Siberian tundra burns, or rain falls on a Greenland icecap, or a coastal marsh is inundated with saltwater and releases more carbon into the atmosphere, the world we’ve known slips further from view.
For much of the book, Park wrestles with her own evolving and shifting belief systems—drawing upon her experiences with Evangelical Christian narratives of apocalypse, resurrection, and redemption—in order to explore the wider context of planet-wide ecological change and transformation. These questions, particularly about the future of our planet, take on all the more urgency—and uncertainty—as she becomes a mother to her son.
As Park delves into the tensions between doubt and faith, loss and hope, the desire for certainty and the constancy of change, she depicts scenes both familiar and uncanny—from singing hymns in church pews to touring a 500-foot-long, life-size replica of Noah’s ark. Through these settings, Park examines the lives of people who are reckoning with a changing world in ways both baffling and harrowing: doomsday preppers, community members working to save a near-extinct tree, a passionate debate about the existence (or non-existence) of a bird.
In her essay “This is Paradise,” Park describes controversial efforts to ensure the survival of the torreya tree, a rare Florida evergreen, through assisted migration (preemptively transplanting the tree into new climate zones where it has a better chance at surviving coming changes), exploring what it means to do the work of repairing worlds even when we believe those worlds to be ending.
Park writes: “In my conversations with people trying to save the torreya, I noticed specific moments in which they seemed hopeful for the tree’s future. But, perhaps more often, they seemed to do the work without much hope at all. Instead, the work itself was its own remedy against despair, against assuming that all was already lost. Talking to them, I began to get a sense of hope on a different scale, with an aperture opening beyond a specific tree’s specific fate…”
“I’ve been compelled,” she continues, “to see what I might learn from a tree that hovers somewhere between the past and the present.”
Similar to the torreya, Park’s essays inhabit a liminal space, a feeling of hovering between, reflective of the broader moment that all of us, in one way or another, find ourselves in: a time of unsettling ecological change.
This moment of ongoing and often drastic transformation of our landscapes and home places is, pointedly, not a time of certainty. It is, in many ways, a planet-wide liminal space, a long arc with no fixed end. Here, too, Park holds the line between questions and answers.
In her essay “Life Everlasting,” Park writes about the ivory-billed woodpecker, a species that is suspended somewhere between existence and extinction depending on who is telling the story, with adamant believers on both sides. She is reluctant to embrace either of the narratives at play here. “Part of me resists mentally overlaying loss onto every tree, placing human destruction at the center of the story of this place, which has existed long before humans and will exist long after us. Part of me also wants to resist neat narratives of death and resurrection, stories that, in their insistence of life everlasting, seem to skip over mourning what has been lost.”
What rings uncomfortably true across Park’s essays are the ways in which this moment of climate upheaval comes with no easy answers. As Park writes of her pregnancy during the pandemic and then of her traumatic experience of birthing her son, she brings her reader into the questions of what it means to face an uncertain future, and what we are, therefore, called to do in the present.
Park’s son and my daughter are near the same age. I found echoes of my own fears and anxieties as a parent, paired with echoes of the joyful present and the immediacy of available love that comes with raising children. This is a bizarre disconnect that is difficult to reconcile: at once inhabiting a world that is narrow and well-defined (being tethered to a bounding, eager, curious four-year-old), while at the same time living through a moment of massive, unfathomable change. How do we tell stories that hold both of these truths?
Defining one’s belief system through questions and doubt, Park seems to be saying, might ultimately invite a place of deeper agency. It is from this liminal space that we can be adaptable, open to change instead of resistant to it, and less likely to shy away from loss and hard truths. Uncertainty is not a failure to find answers, but a way of leaving space for the imaginative, creative, and vital work that is needed now—a way of staying open, of locating spaces of possibility, and of finding our footing on shifting ground.
“Before I became pregnant with my son, I worried constantly about my future child inheriting a diminishing world; when I looked around me, all I could see was loss,” writes Park. “But once he was born, once he became not a future possibility but a present-day fact, I began to see these unpredictable ways—non-adherent to any baseline or ideal—that creatures find to thrive.”
Attentive presence can be a difficult space to inhabit, but it can also be beautiful, especially when it invites us into moments of exquisite vulnerability. My daughter, Park’s son, and children the world over are coming into a world in the throes of becoming something different. May we have the courage to witness the unbearable losses. May we have the strength to live in service to thriving.
Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder is the author of Mother, Creature, Kin: What We Learn From Nature’s Mothers in a Time of Unraveling (Broadleaf Books, 2025). She received her masters of theological studies at Harvard Divinity School and previously worked as a staff writer and editor for Emergence Magazine. Her writing can be found in The Atlantic, Nautilus, The Common, Decor Maine, Crannóg Magazine, EcoTheo Review, From the Ground Up, CooNoor&Co, the edited poetry collection Writing the Land, and in Katie Holten’s The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape. She lives with her family in Rochester, Vermont.
Read an excerpt of Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder’s Mother, Creature, Kin published in Terrain.org: “A Community of Trees.”
Header photo of torreya by NMTD MEDIA, courtesy Shutterstock.
