https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/09/what-i-learned-from-preparing-for-the-end-of-the-world

As a child, Carys Bray believed that the Second Coming was imminent. Two decades on, she reflects on losing her faith and facing today’s ecological crisis

It’s a glorious June afternoon and as I dig up turf to make a vegetable bed, I’m listening to extracts from parson-naturalist Gilbert White’s diary. Written on this day in the 1770s and broadcast on Melissa Harrison’s podcast The Stubborn Light of Things, White’s diary reports a month of dry weather; he mentions bees and cucumber frames, nightingales, bats and a great thunderstorm. This litany of the quotidian is comforting; it reminds me of my “place in the family of things” and provides a moment’s relief from present anxieties. As I continue digging, I glance at the desiccated tips of potato plants caught in a late frost, and I settle into more well-worn worries. Time spent in my garden in Lancashire invariably leads to thoughts of ecological collapse and the climate emergency, a phrase that takes me straight back to my childhood.

I was born into a religious community that believed the Second Coming was imminent. In Sunday school lessons and church magazine articles we learned about the signs of the times: disease, pestilence and further calamities would eventually be followed by a final, great war. In preparation for what lay ahead we were instructed to store extra food, and to create a portable emergency pack for every family member. My parents were pragmatic, speaking of our spare baked beans as a bulwark against everyday disruption, but the illustrated children’s scriptures contained cartoonish images of disaster and, in my mind, these looming catastrophes were inextricably linked to our provisions.