Nick Offerman

He said it's quite likely that it's Mother Nature's way of keeping us from becoming even more overpopulated than we already are.

Seems a little bit pessimistic, but kind of something we deserve in some ways.

Well, maybe.

I mean, there certainly is dark, but life has darkness.

I mean, you know, there's springtime and blossom, and then there's death and decay, and it's the cycle of life.

He was an optimistic guy, but I think that he was saying that's kind of the conundrum of humanity is that we have both within us.

One of the tensions in your book is what you refer to as the juxtaposition of our responsible use of nature with our ownership of it.

What have the trips that you've taken over the years around the country shown you about this dichotomy now?

Well, it sort of brought into very sharp focus the difference that Wendell Berry talked to me about in sort of assigning me the riddle that fueled this book, and that is seeing the national park circumstances differently.

which is like the beauty of nature as something we have to travel to, you know, something other than where we are.

It became quite clear that, you know, it's an actual... It's a whole business.

It's something that people have always done, you know, when John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt and George Byrd Grinnell and their peers established our national parks and said, these are our crown jewels, you know.

It's still...

is very prevalent today.

When people talk about conservation or nature and preserving nature, it brings to mind images of, to me, the Sierra Club and Greenpeace and Yosemite and, you know, the orcas and, you know, the Alaskan Ocean and so forth.

Yeah, exactly.

And what I came to then learn, because Wendell sort of

pointed me in the right direction, was how interconnected all of us actually are.

So not only is nature in our backyard and in our windowsills and everywhere around us, but we also are just as much a part of that nature as El Capitan or any panda.

And that our relationships with each other