Nick Offerman doesn’t want to preach, but he will gently hand you a reusable water bottle while discussing capitalism’s most sinister byproduct: bottled water.
“I’ve had this same one for five years,” he tells me, holding up a beat-up canteen. “It’s from my woodshop. I don’t use disposable plastic bottles. Why are we allowing corporations to sell us our own water back to us in plastic?”
That’s the kind of broccoli he sneaks into the pizza of his latest book, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play. Yes, it’s funny. Yes, Jeff Tweedy falls down a mountain. But it’s also about colonization, climate change, consumerism, reparations, factory farming, and the war on empathy. With jokes.
“I try to do my best to write with common sense and affection for my fellow humans,” Offerman says. “I’d give myself maybe an 83% success on this one.”
For a book often labeled as “about nature,” Deer and the Antelope is less a field guide and more a mirror. “It’s about our place in nature—or rather, our ignorance of it,” he explains. “Capitalism and consumerism have made us really comfortable throwing our stuff away, eating our stuff, wearing our stuff. Once in a while we notice there’s a giant plastic island floating in the ocean, and then we go back to fantasy football.”
The book opens in Henry County, Kentucky, where Offerman breaks bread with Wendell Berry, whose writings gave him a sort of agrarian epiphany. “I realized I could tell the stories I want to tell through that lens,” he says. “Wendell’s fiction was like, Hey dummy, this is you. This is your community. These values matter.”
Offerman, who grew up in small-town Illinois with “a cultural vacuum and some breakdancing tapes,” didn’t always know where he fit. “I don’t really have taste,” he confesses. “My wife does. I had Queen, Duran Duran, and breakdancing cassettes from Chicago radio. That was my culture.”
It wasn’t until college in Champaign-Urbana that the oasis revealed itself. “Friends gave me They Might Be Giants, Talking Heads, Uncle Tupelo,” he recalls. “They Might Be Giants’ Lincoln was my quickening. Like I was the Highlander and suddenly had powers. That song ‘Your Racist Friend’—that was huge for me. Popular culture with a social message? It blew my mind.”
From there it was a short jump to Tom Waits (“This is me. This is my life.”) and to plays with “empathetic messages,” which led to Sam Shepard, which led to Berry, and suddenly Offerman was standing in Glacier National Park with George Saunders and Jeff Tweedy, talking about Indigenous land theft and the moral bankruptcy of factory farming.
He compares the lack of empathy behind the treatment of Indigenous people to the industrial meat industry. “It all stems from the same thing,” he says. “Someone saying, these people or these animals don’t matter. They’re less than human. Let’s brutalize them and take their stuff.”
There’s anger in the book, yes. But also awe. Also jokes. (One includes a testicle joke in the wilderness. We’ll leave it there.) And there’s hope.
“You can fight every battle just by making small daily choices,” Offerman says. “We’re all dumb. We’re gonna mess up. But let’s at least hang that as our carrot. Let’s make empathy cool again.”
He’d like to make writing like this his full-time gig—if the Berrys allow it. “I told them, if I could spend my life communicating Wendell’s writing to people, I’d be happy,” he says. “They said, Why don’t you try writing your own stuff? So we’re still dancing, in a collaborative way.”
And if all else fails? At least stop buying plastic water bottles.
Watch the interview above and then check out this interview with Nick and Kyle from 2019.
