I am an environmental science major, and one of the first things we learn about the ecosystems we seek to protect are the “services” they can provide us––because how can we make non-environmentalists care about the planet without coaxing them with what the planet can give them in return? These categories of services include provisioning services, regulating services, supporting services, and cultural services. Cultural services are, as defined by the National Wildlife Federation, a “non-material benefit that contributes to the development and cultural advancement of people…the building of knowledge and the spreading of ideas; creativity born from interactions with nature (music, art, architecture); and recreation.” (nwf.org, N.D). The “recreation” they reference is tourism. “Cultural services” are exactly what William Colton is addressing in his paper, “The Trouble with Wilderness”. The sublime beauty and innate inhumanity early explorers like Thoreau and Wordsworth described in the texts they made public is what the National Wildlife Foundation is referencing now as a “service”. Something “serving” of us, not untamed and terrifying like what Thoreau and Wordsworth described. The foundation is actively encouraging more human presence in the natural world as a way of furthering our intellectual discoveries and creativities, while also making the income they rely on to maintain the preserve with the influx of tourism to these places, as people seek out this “service” they are promised. Colton mentions this attitude at its birth, as following these popular works by explorers featuring The Sublime, “more and more tourists sought out the wilderness as a spectacle to be looked at and enjoyed for its great beauty, [and] the sublime in effect became domesticated.” (12). Just like some best-selling new book on the shelf at Barnes and Nobles or blockbuster movie everyone is talking about, the “wilderness” became a commodity to come get a look at for yourself, diminishing it’s obscurity and turning it into an anthropocentric novelty. Who wouldn’t want to get a taste of the novel Unknown (or rather, freshly broken in “Unknown”)? And in this mentality of everyone wanting to be an explorer, the unknown becomes known and we take hold of it. It is there where we claim nature but label it “other”, label it “wilderness”, though, since our invasion, it is anything but. It now exists in the maps made from clear-cut trees bunched up tightly in the fists of visitors that will inevitably end up on the ground of the trails they claim this “service” from. It exists in our hands, yet we comfort ourselves by naming it “wild” and clutching onto the idea that it is our escape. But there is no escape now; we are everywhere.