Where Seldom is Heard a Discouraging Word: Nick Offerman’s Latest Thoughts on Nature...and Politics
What Nick Offerman gets right about adventure, nature, and agrarianism is cheapened by his trite diatribes on politics. A response to Nick Offerman’s latest book 'Where the Deer and the Antelope Play'
I don’t want to “punch up” at the man who birthed us Ron Swanson. I like Nick Offerman. I love his acting and his sense of humor. In my opinion, he should have won a boatload of Emmy awards, more than just the one, for his role in The Last of Us. I am not ashamed to admit I cried over how beautiful his performance was in his episode and watched it twice because I loved it so much. We share a lot in common: we both have a fondness for sauntering in nature, splitting firewood, sipping scotch, and searing steaks—and those are just the things that start with s. We’re also Midwesterners who appear to both be recovering, guilt-ridden, former Catholics.
First, the good and charitable things. There’s a fair amount to agree with and laugh at in Nick Offerman’s latest book Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside. I found his honesty, humor, and willingness to be vulnerable and self-deprecating, respectable and refreshing, even if the jokes seemed a little forced at times. What he has to say about the downsides of monoculture in modern agricultural practices, factory farming, our over-dependence on fossil fuels and fertilizers, wanton destruction of nature, our consumerism and over-reliance on materialism for our happiness, the need to support smaller more sustainable farms, and the urgency for us to learn, respect, and cherish agrarianism, pastoralism, and naturalism is spot on as far as I can tell.
I also wholeheartedly agreed with the canon of naturalists he momentarily visits with—everyone should absolutely read as much John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Darwin, Wendell Barry, and many other naturalists as they can but perhaps don’t get so infatuated with the fact they are all “straight white men.” Ideas are ideas regardless of what bodily phenotypes they emanate from. Here are 25 women who have written about the wild to supplement the naturalist canon. However, that list leaves out Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking which I also encourage everyone to read.
Here is something I loved. Toward the beginning of the book, he endorses the kind of spontaneous wandering and spirit of adventure I too argue for:
“Break up your cycle. Get out of your rut. Find a way in your normal setting to ‘feel alive.’ One thing I’ll do is get up early and see the sunrise from my yard…Jump in a chilly swimming pool! If it belongs to your neighbor, experiment with not telling them. Don a thong and maybe a midriff tank and head to the post office. I have not tried that one yet but I bet it won’t be boring. Goosing myself out of normal, daily redundancies helps me to stay open and curious to the ever-shifting world around me.”
Brilliant, whimsical, and unpretentious. I can actually hear Ron Swanson in my head reading this. Part I of his book starts fairly strong. It’s funny and the scenes of him sharing camaraderie with his buddies in Glacier National Park excite the wanderlust in the reader that I expected the whole book to carry on with. But then it rapidly dropped off with less and less humor and fewer reflections on the significance of nature and adventure. I’m sorry to report that the last two-thirds of the book is like air leaving a balloon with that loud obnoxious noise that carries on for far too long.
As I teetered back and forth reading the latter parts of the book, I went from enjoying the musings on nature and having a hearty laugh at times to then countering with sighing and shaking my head. I’m not sure I understand Offerman’s decision to dive into politics in a book like this, but in doing so he rejects nuance, a term he himself uses liberally, as he takes the opportunity to bad mouth white folks, especially conservative ones.
“‘Conservative’ politics…is a polite term for discriminatory culture…preserving a Christian, white ethno-state.”
He can’t help but resist the popular left-wing urge to carry his logic to absurdity with this,
“[T]he path to justice and equality for all Americans and ultimately all earthlings is going to require all of us safe, white, unoppressed softies to shut the hell up.”
And this,
“[T]he dominant white culture that has been in power so long has been wrong in almost every way, and finding out what actually is right will require a lot of listening and then the instituting of new ideas.”
Not brilliant, not whimsical, but quite pretentious. Personally, I wish the entire world would take a year or two vow of silence given how obnoxious so many folks’ politics are these days, but I know the world doesn’t care what I want and I know by now that being sanctimonious rarely works to change hearts and minds.
So, in a democracy where more than 70% of the population may identify as white, they’re supposed to just “shut the hell up” and listen and follow whatever the people who may identify as an oppressed minority think about everything? And on a global scale, too? Does he think injustice and inequality only reside in the history and current state of the United States and that we’d all be better off not speaking up on these matters?
Now, I am by no means on the conservative or religious side of most issues, but this is pretty extreme to sensible ears. If you ever had anybody on Team Red still reading this up to this point, well, you lost them here. So much for nuance.
As tempting as it would be to debate his stance, line by line, and show you how it is your run-of-the-mill regurgitated leftist diatribes, I want to focus on why I am frustrated by his exasperated approach. Offerman has a platform and a modestly-sized audience. He can reach people. And he chose alienation over understanding.
I’ll never forget something one of our hiking compatriots, going by the trail name Forester Gump said while we were backpacking the Appalachian Trail years ago,
“The Trail is really about people. It’s about sharing a common struggle. And what is remarkable is that all barriers are stripped away out here. No one is concerned about where you come from, your politics, your religion, your creed. All the petty things are brushed away and what’s left is what’s important.”
The thing is, you don’t have to tell people all about your bland identity politics in a book about experiencing the outdoors. Just encourage more folks to get out of their comfort zones to have an adventure and interact with others regardless of their politics and the rest will follow. Maybe that isn’t true in all cases but it will be for most. Most of us deep down want to live in a world that is more peaceful and harmonious and the closest I’ve witnessed a chance of that world happening was on the Appalachian Trail living amongst a diverse set of people sharing a common struggle. There are many places in this world where actual nuance and honest attempts to understand each other exist, but it is not online— it is outside in the real world.
In my previous article What Does Travel and Adventure Offer Us?, I talk about how travel and adventure tend to connect us with others and open the mind when you encounter different types of people with diverse backgrounds and opinions. In all of Offerman’s musings, he doesn’t discuss a single interaction with the folks he bad mouths for 332 pages. His criticism of politics is strictly one-sided, castigating Team Red, while having no ill words for Team Blue–where seldom is heard a discouraging word. This is disappointing and undermines the call for nuance.
Gandhi said,
“Be the change you want to see in the world”
and Marcus Aurelius said,
“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”
If you care about nature and sustainability, show people you’re doing something sustainable for that cause.
If you care about adventure, show people actionable steps to having one.
If you care about history, show people the wide array of books available to them and encourage them to read more widely and deeply.
If you care about ending injustice, inequality, and actual getting-punched-in-the-face-by-a-fist violence, show people the ways you are contributing toward justice, equality, and the prevention of violence.
I get it. We live in frustrating and disorienting times and we wish others could more easily share our worldviews. A painful lesson when you are a student of human psychology is that you learn that it is actually very difficult for people to change their minds and this applies to everyone including politicians, scientists, and our greatest intellectuals. This should give us pause and humble us.
We must learn to be more patient with one another and that means we have to work harder to resist the urge to assume the worst in others. We don’t have to be reactionary or tethered to politics all the time. Offerman missed an opportunity to be a bridge in our otherwise divisive political landscape. Many of us are just as exhausted with the reactionaries from both Team Blue and Team Red and desperate to move beyond the tribalism, cynicism, and misanthropy that sticks to everything in culture and society these days.
Many people will always emulate the behavior of those with large followings. Do you want to be the one encouraging your audience to be frustrated and name-calling their neighbors or the one who is patient and willing to have a hard conversation–to listen and hear with the ones you don’t see eye to eye with but may yet come to change a few hearts and minds?
Those with more resources and education must also be kept mindful of the fact that they may have a lot more free time on their hands to explore and read about the world than people struggling to make ends meet. It took me a while to appreciate that fact. So for all their faults, poor and working-class folks don’t need the endless berating coming from all the well-off liberals who get to saunter in the woods for weeks, live it up in an airstream, and make it on the New York Times bestseller for writing a humorous but otherwise mediocre book.
If ever I meet Mr. Offerman, I’d much rather we settle our differences over a wood-splitting contest followed by a long discussion over scotch around a fire. The English language is rich, but lately has become so denuded that we’re obsessed with “punching”, “destroying”, “attacking”, and “owning” each other so much in our discourse that people genuinely believe now that “words are violence.” Can we not be more sophisticated, civil, and—most of all— a little more humorous in our debates and discussions with one another?
These things used to go without saying: you can adamantly disagree with someone, even going so far as to ridicule their ideas, and still like and respect them as a person. I still like and respect Nick Offerman. He’s a funny, adventurous dude who builds badass canoes. Nowadays, we often conflate critiquing someone’s ideas with “attacking” them as a person, which is otherwise known as ad hominem. If you must resort to calling people idiots or fascists or white supremacists or scumbags or dipshits to make your points, you’re probably not making a strong argument to begin with. You lose some respect in many peoples’ minds the moment you start presuming large swaths of a population sit conveniently in a category of “dum-dums.” Resist that temptation. Rise above.
As easy as it is to scapegoat and castigate others for all society’s problems, we have to transcend putting people in boxes and presuming people’s intentions across our political and social landscape. We all do it. But we don’t have to. Learn to be civil, humble, and humorous regardless of your politics. Far too many of us are “too online” these days. So by all means, get offline and get outside!
Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow.
Cheers!
-JSB