As our environmental policies regress under a regime which declines to accept the harpooning of our planet, it is more necessary than ever to pay attention to the blue humanities. But, as policies shift, so too must the aim of blue humanities. As captivating as it is, it is time to stop romanticizing the sea. It is no longer a scene that unveils “pristine nature” in contrast to the industrialized land we inhabit. Industrialization has meandered its way into the ocean, into the water. Steve Mentz uses Aristotle’s conceptualization of poetics to help define his term: “Poetics of planetary water”. In this concept, Aristotle explains poetics as “a system of representations”. Mentz is drawn to the notion that “poetics combines pleasure and pain” in regard to water that both “allure and threaten human bodies”. Mentz furthers Aristotle’s claim that “though the objects themselves may be painful to see, we delight to view the most realistic representations of them”, as a parallel of the enchanting, yet dangerous relationship we have had with the ocean throughout human history. In blue humanities future, this notion will have to be reversed: Though the ocean, the water, may be a beautiful sight, we must agonize over the most realistic representations of it. The trash ridden, biomagnificated, micro-plastic filled animals that inhabit the bleached, dead, splintering coral of the acidified ocean. We need depictions of a climate changed future. Paintings of risen seas. New York halfway under water. Undiscovered life straining to create ecosystems in the shipwreck that was once Manhattan. Netflix series that delineate a climate fueled apocalypse rather than a zombie or digital one. That is, if we want to see another societal push for eco-change. Mentz coins the phrase “watery criticism” the aims of which “include both describing the complex working of water in our environment and also imagining ways to change our relationships to it.” The immensity and resilience of the ocean conceals hundreds of years of pollution the way small bodied ecosystems cannot. Refocusing the blue humanities to embody all forms of water, captures the deterioration climate change imparts on small ecosystems. Therefore, adapting our attention to all forms of water changes our relationship with it. As much as the blue humanities depends on water, water depends on the blue humanities.