ABSTRACT. — Climate scientist Peter Kalmus wrote “I feel like the climate scientists have kind of done our job… we’ve laid it out pretty clearly, but nobody’s doing anything. So now it’s kind of up to the social scientists.” Focusing specifically on the oceans, the UNESCO’s “One Planet, One Ocean” initiative indicates that “we need to change the way we think and act”. The ocean is a fundamental resource for life on the planet and for humans in particular as recognized, if belatedly, in the preamble to the 2015 Paris Agreement, which states: “the importance of ensuring the integrity of all ecosystems, including oceans.” A liter of seawater contains between 10 and 100 billion microorganism, “forming a continuous global ecosystem that generates approximately half of planetary oxygen, sustains the large majority of marine life, and regulates atmospheric CO2 and climate” (de Vargas et al., 2020; Falkowski, 2012). The ocean is massively used as a resource for food (Holm, 2012), where it has been driven to the brink of depletion, in particular in the age of mechanized, industrial fishing (Fagan, 2017). At the same time, it is a major dump of human-produced chemicals and of human debris in general (Tani, 2018), including nuclear waste. Most importantly, the ocean has cushioned 94% of all the surplus heat generated by anthropogenic activities (1% is absorbed by the atmosphere, the rest by continents and continental ice melting) (Speich, 2019). This means that the ocean has accumulated enormous internal energy, has increased in volume, has become more acidic and contains less oxygen. The paper shows that misconceptions about the ocean (as boundless, as a hyperresource, as alien, as dominated by the land) run deep in public and media discourse, public policies, business practices, the law, and individual behavior. It targets the identification of a sizable number of core misconceptions, and proposes ad-hoc conceptual negotiations (Casati 2010) to implement adequate and effective conceptual replacement.