Where the Deer and the Antelope Play Quotes

“Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“Mother Nature is not an American, and she is not proud. She is all creation, so her vibe encompasses all experience, in every size, shape, and color, from the high to the low. Her economy and it's successful evolution thrive on diversity, and her children never rest in their glorious participation, reproducing and adapting, so as to grow ever stronger.”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“I know of no better way to make a friend than to pitch in on hard work together, and the shittier the conditions, the faster the friendship forms.”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“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, or for some bonus points, from my roof or a nearby hilltop. 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'll bet it won't be boring.”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“John Fugelsang put it quite succinctly when he said, “The only way you can follow both Trump and Jesus is if you’ve never read either of their books.”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“The argument that our nation should be allied with any one religion, or religion at all, is simply bonkers. It's about as solipsistic as thinking can get, to somehow try to reconcile the supposed American ideals of diversity and freedom for all with those of your church (or synagogue or mosque, but I believe it's mainly the churches that are pissing in this particular bed). If our national sloganeering and jingoistic jingles don't recognize the varied nuances of humanity by acknowledging our past mistakes (and crimes) against and our present dependence upon said variety, then those refrains are not patriotic at all, they're nationalist.”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“The only way you can follow both Trump and Jesus is if you’ve never read either of their books.”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“As Wendell Berry says, “Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“we were facing millions of otherwise competent-seeming citizens holding up wet bags of shit, screaming that it was chocolate ice cream.”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“It all continues to come back to remembering that none of us is an island, and that we really do have to think of others in the way we use, well, everything.”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“We can never comprehend all of the information in an given circumstance, so the brain creates little false, constructed scale models to allow us to function, but they're all incorrect. Because of all the information we're missing, the more complex and substantial your imagined scale models become, the more deluded you actually grow.”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“propose that we consider our farmers on a spectrum, let’s say, of agrarianism. On one end of the spectrum we have farmers like James, interested in producing the finest foodstuffs that they can, given the soil, the climate, the water, the budget, and their talent. They observe how efficacious or not their efforts are proving, and they adapt accordingly. Variety is one of the keys to this technique, eschewing the corporate monocultures for a revolving set of plants and animals, again, to mimic what was already happening on the land before we showed up with our earth-shaving machinery. It’s tough as hell, and in many cases impossible, to farm this way and earn enough profit to keep your bills paid and your family fed, but these farmers do exist. On the other end of the spectrum is full-speed-ahead robo-farming, in which the farmer is following the instructions of the corporation to produce not food but commodities in such a way that the corporation sits poised to make the maximum financial profit. Now, this is the part that has always fascinated me about us as a population: This kind of farmer is doing all they can to make their factory quota for the company, of grain, or meat, or what have you, despite their soil, climate, water, budget, or talent. It only stands to reason that this methodology is the very definition of unsustainable. Clearly, this is an oversimplification of an issue that requires as much of my refrain (nuance!) as any other human endeavor, but the broad strokes are hard to refute. The first farmer is doing their best to work with nature. The second farmer is doing their best despite nature. In order for the second farmer to prosper, they must defeat nature. A great example of this is the factory farming of beef/pork/chicken/eggs/turkey/salmon/etc. The manufacturers of these products have done everything they can to take the process out of nature entirely and hide it in a shed, where every step of the production has been engineered to make a profit; to excel at quantity. I know you’re a little bit ahead of me here, but I’ll go ahead and ask the obvious question: What of quality? If you’re willing to degrade these many lives with impunity—the lives of the animals themselves, the workers “growing” them, the neighbors having to suffer the voluminous poisons being pumped into the ecosystem/watershed, and the humans consuming your products—then what are you about? Can that even be considered farming? Again, I’m asking this of us. Of you and me, because what I have just described is the way a lot of our food is produced right now, in the system that we all support with our dollars. How did we get here, in both the US and the UK? How can we change our national stance toward agriculture to accommodate more middle-size farmers and less factory farms? How would Aldo Leopold feel about it?”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“As soon as I can every year upon arriving, after we have unloaded our groceries and put the trailered boats into the water, I get onto the lake with my dad and others, and we motor out to an appropriate spot to begin our yearly offering of nightcrawlers to the pike and panfish gods. We shut off the motor and drift, or drop an anchor, depending on the breeze, and our boat undulates slowly in the silent flow of the lake, as we almost melt.”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“This feast to my senses washed over me completely, as though the mountain breeze were actually washing the accumulated grime of daily life from my very spirit.”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles. —Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“Here is a tough fact: According to an NPR/Marist poll at the end of the hearings, a majority of Republicans (54 percent) said they thought he should be approved whether Ford’s allegations were true or not. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by this, coming from a party that slavishly loved their double-impeached, alleged rapist in the White House.”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“The frequency with which I greet the people I pass in the street never really occurred to me as anything other than normal. As a kid, not only would one certainly greet your fellow walkers, but one would also wave at fellow drivers, since the odds were good that you knew them. We called this behavior simply being neighborly. A salutation was offered, either vocally or in the form of a gesture, to establish a level of reassurance that we were all in agreement with each other—we wouldn’t commit acts of violence against one another, nor hornswoggling or other chicanery.”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“we were absolutely on cloud nine (a figure of speech that is said to have originated in London in 1896, when Sir Ralph Abercromby’s attention coincided with the newly published International Cloud Atlas. The scientific document listed the cumulonimbus as cloud number nine, the tallest possible cloud. I love it—it wasn’t enough to say “I’m on top of a cloud,” but it had to be qualified by specifying that one was on top of the categorically tallest of clouds).”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing.”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“The clear tendency of industrial agriculture has been to destroy any living thing that cannot be sold,”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, ‘What good is it?’ If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of eons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“There are people who want things to stay the way they are, or be “conserved,” and then there are people who understand that “the way things are” is actually quite shitty for a lot of our fellow Americans, so they are interested in our social construct’s “progressing” to the long-dreamed-of point where the promises of the Constitution can be kept for all Americans.”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“Often I'll have visited a state because one of their universities will have invited me to perform for their students who like to hear about woodworking, and this has been a great way to discern where it is that "my people" reside. Even in places with more openly "conservative" politics (which is a polite term for discriminatory culture, as in "We would prefer you take your rainbow ass elsewhere as we are conserving a Christian white enthno-state hereabouts"), the open-minded thinkers and the nonconformists and the lovers of decency come out for a laugh and a think at content like my song about Brett Kavanaugh entitled "I Like Beer.”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“We had climate change, we had Black people being murdered by police officers, we had our usual national menu of violence against women, we had all kinds of discrimination happening, and if you're still here with me for part 3, then you know the list: all the societal evils that blossom at the bottom of the barrel in a population and fester and spread the cankers of hate and fear and greed. The qualities in humanity against which some of us strive to progress, and thereby improve, in the hopes that one day nobody will have to endure being systemically shat upon. Accordingly, and accurately, this relative stance causes us to be labeled "progressives," but it doesn't stop at that, apparently. We are also radical, socialist, communist, Marxist, leftist libtards whom our detractors love to see cry.”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“A true national or state anthem should absolutely cop to our iniquities. If America is going to have any hope of one day being great, it will be by finally facing slavery, genocide, domestic terrorism, Japanese American internment camps, and the list of commensurate evils that runs right up to to today and into tomorrow. If a person bases their worldview on the lyrics of these old songs, it's not surprising that they could easily end up indoctrinated into the White Power army, even unwittingly. How can a song extol the so-called glories of this nation without mentioning the exemplary heroics of our civil rights activities and suffragists and abolitionists?”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“We must understand that each and every one of us is a cog or a wheel in the ecosystem of Leopold's parlance, and that like it or not, you need me. And I need you, every gorgeous, goddamn one of you, to continue to engender the ethics of agrarianism throughout the world, to save our food systems, our farmers, our civilizations, and ultimately ourselves. It's the biggest no-brainer in the history of mankind.”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, 'What good is it?' If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of eons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside

“It's born of the understanding that we're all just doing our best, although we're selfish, clumsy humans, to get through each day with the slightest semblance of grace.”
― Nick Offerman, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside