Painting and writing about the human place in a marine environment position us to recognize the ethical stakes in our climate future as well as the potential for an inclusive reinvention of our social contract. The ocean — the actual physical thing of tides and waves Melville’s Ishmael called “the watery part of the world” — is the primary space in which climate change manifests. Where that watery world overlaps with human lives we get the fiercest impacts of a hotter planet. Art depicting people disoriented by a fierce ocean offers one story fitted to the climate reality we inhabit now. These are aesthetic invitations to make sense of human futures in an unstable element. They show us we have accommodated and even thrived in such conditions before, and they give shape to the cultural priority of imagining the new climate.