On Tuesday, I was very pleased to attend the symposium with Dr. Steve Mentz, a contributor to the term “Blue Humanities”. It is clear that he appreciates every scholar’s input into the conversation which is why he emphasizes the fact that the work he does is collaborative. Without others to explore to depths of the ocean through scholarly humanities research, the profundity of the work wouldn’t be as immense.

I never really considered how our physical engagement with the world can shape the way we think about the environment through a literary perspective. Especially when talking about water—which is around us and in us—we must take into consideration how we give to and receive what we have in the world. I would like to bring this into the topic of our class in general about how capitalism has commodified and fetishized books. If it wasn’t the printing press that did it, it was capitalism to increase the desire for books and mass produce them. Therefore, it has become increasingly startling to see the damage we have done to the environment despite our “good” intentions to read and intake information to learn more about humanity.

This leads me into the discussion of the original purposes of these materials. They were not made or provided so we could produce books. Just like how most of the water on earth is not made for human use. The majority of water on earth is salt water, and the majority of fresh water is ice. Unfortunately, we once again are treating water as something that can utilize even through new media by using terms such as “surfing the web” and “data flow”. The one thing I loved from this conversation and is my key take-away is that industrialization challenges nature and tries to establish permanence. But the edge of the sea is never the same from minute to minute (as I try to roughly paraphrase what Mentz said) and there will always be that house that crumbles from erosion.