The Article “The Blue Humanities” by John R. Gillis takes the point made in last week’s reading of “The Trouble With Wilderness” by William Cronon a step further—narrowing the human-made idea of “wilderness” to one specific aspect of the environment: The Ocean. In what we observed from Cronon, we learned about how humanity constructed the idea of the untouched “wilderness” in order to blind ourselves to not only our misdeeds (pollution, loss of biodiversity, overconsumption) but our presence in every area of the world. There is no where to hide from ourselves and our wrongdoings, and we comfort ourselves through delusion. Gillis teaches us about the history of human’s perception of the ocean, once being overlooked, to being feared, to being a new place of solace—a new place to hide. Since the ocean, having been believed to be an empty abyss, was vastly unexplored, humanity was able to project their dreams onto and escape into the deep. He states, “Pristine nature, now in short supply in industrialized heartlands, found refuge in the oceans, while the mystery once associated with terra incognita relocated to the deeps.”, explaining the need to escape that affected a vast majority of people, specifically in urbanized environments, who were immediate witnesses to humanity’s destruction of the natural world. As industrialization became more developed, the world as people knew it began to shrink: in cities, as large buildings were raised and city limits expanded, there was less and less world to be found in the common space, and even in nature, as temperate forests were clear-cut to construct these buildings, life that was not polluted by industrial values disappeared. The only piece of the natural world that was left for people to grasp onto was the ocean, so much so “they want about them talismans of nature on their walls, their shelves, their keyrings.” (Paterson-Hamilton), to be kept as reminders of what life is still out there, life beyond the smog and concrete. But even those talismans are part of the grand constructed delusion, as the ecosystems that were reaped in order collect those talismans were forever tainted. In the hands of collectors desperate for comfort that there is still pure life out there, or in the lungs of swimmers desperate to be part of it, or in the literature of Atlantis that plays in the dreams of people who can no longer see the stars, there is hope that not all has been lost to consumption. But it is already too late, and unless those hopes turn into reparations, and we stop running from the reality of our impact, the problem will only worsen with ignorance.