But it’s important to be culpable and to comfortably admit that to one another. I was brought up Catholic, so I’m hard-wired to feel guilty.

Is this guilt or a way to let readers know they don’t need to be perfectly virtuous to fight for change? Much of the humor is self-deprecating you acknowledge that it’s odd to deliver an environmental message by driving an Airstream around the country. I aspire to conveying that emotion more than to matching what Wordsworth might have had to say. When I’m bounding across the hillside with my shepherd friend, it isn’t my panache in describing the plant life or the burbling stream that makes it work so much as the joy I felt mending his stone wall. Instead I get into the personal experience and find the emotion that way. I want the reader to know what I felt on this trail or in this pasture, but I’ve seen this done so beautifully dozens of times that I’m not going to try to come up with the lyrical sequence of adjectives and nouns. I’m such a fan of beautiful pastoral writing, from the Romantics up through modern day, so this is a particular challenge. His discursive style also enables him to take on everything from Kit Carson’s reputation to a personal philosophy of mask wearing and his disdain for guys whose vehicles “growl, roar or vroom in any way louder than is necessary.” “My books are usually an excuse to work out the life questions that are concerning me in the moment,” Offerman says. It’s an exploration of our relationship to the land and the creatures that inhabit it - what it is now and what it should be - often incorporating the ideas of two different naturalists, John Muir and Aldo Leopold. In his latest book, “ Where the Deer and the Antelope Play,” Nick Offerman describes a number of memorable nature rambles: hiking Glacier National Park with a couple of pals who happen to be Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy and Booker Prize-winning author George Saunders pitching in on an English farm with shepherd-turned-author James Rebanks roaming the Southwest with his wife, actress Megan Mullally.īut the book is more than a name-droppy road trip. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.

Nick offerman where the deer