The Art of What Won't Last

Impermanence as Teacher in a Changing Ocean

There’s a moment—usually right after the last rake stroke—when an Andres Amador sand drawing becomes something more than geometry. Amador, whose monumental sand designs span entire stretches of shoreline, treats the beach as both canvas and co-creator. The pattern is immaculate, huge, and briefly ours: an imprint of intention across an impossibly shifting surface. And then the tide rolls in.

Image © Andres Amador

To some, that erasure looks like loss. To others, futility.

But for those of us who’ve spent our lives working for the ocean, something else happens in that moment. Impermanence stops being a threat, and instead becomes a teacher. The shoreline gives us back a question we rarely pause to ask: What does it mean to do meaningful work when nothing stays still?

Amador’s ephemeral beachscapes offer one entry point. The ocean offers the rest.

Ecological Impermanence: The Ocean That Never Stops Becoming

The ocean has never been static—not before industrialization, not before climate change, not even before the first cells split in two. Kelp forests expand and contract. Coral reefs bleach and re-spawn. Estuaries trade sediments like stories passed down between generations. And even the seafloor participates in this restless becoming: marine escarpments collapse and entomb whole communities in an instant, while ancient seabeds rise over millennia to become the coastal terraces we now walk here in California. New landscapes built from old seafloors, where long-buried communities occasionally reemerge in stone, their fossilized forms a reminder of how change both buries and reveals.

Impermanence, in the ecological sense, is not fragility, it’s dynamism. And yet we often tell our conservation stories backwards. We long for “pristine” baselines and place our hope in some permanent, undisturbed state that never existed. The reality is messier and, in its way, more generous.

Because ecosystems are always in motion, they are also always full of potential.

The challenge is that not all changes in the ocean belong to its natural rhythm. Many of today’s disruptions—industrial dredging, shoreline hardening, deep-sea extraction, the slow suffocation of sediment and pollution—aren’t part of the ocean’s own choreography. These aren’t waves brushing away patterns; they’re bulldozers leveling the beach.

And yet the ocean’s inherent capacity for renewal gives us something to work with. It teaches us that recovery is possible when we reduce the pressures we can directly influence: cooling waters where feasible, easing local stressors, strengthening Indigenous governance, and giving species the space and time they need to adapt. Impermanence tells us that restoration is renewal, not nostalgia.

Climate-Driven Impermanence: A Distortion of the Natural Rhythm

Climate change adds a new and more volatile dimension to impermanence—one that is not cyclical or creative but destabilizing. The ocean has always been a place of change, but now that change is accelerating beyond anything ecosystems can absorb or adapt to. Heatwaves erase kelp forests in a single season; coral communities that once recovered now face back-to-back bleaching events without time to breathe; storm-driven sediment burial and sea-level rise redraw coastlines faster than policy can understand.

This is not the generative impermanence that teaches humility—it’s the kind that forces a reckoning.

And perhaps this becomes our literal line in the sand: the moment when we stop treating worsening extremes as an inevitability we must “get used to,” and instead insist that decision-makers confront the harms their choices are amplifying. Natural impermanence may be a teacher, but climate-driven impermanence is a warning—and a boundary we cross at our peril.

Artful Impermanence: The Kind That Makes Us Look Deeper

Amador’s work isn’t a metaphor for the ocean; it’s of the ocean. The tide is collaborator, co-author, editor, antagonist, and applause.

Image © Andres Amador

Watching one of his pieces disappear isn’t watching it die, it’s watching it complete its cycle. A reminder that beauty is not less real for being temporary. A reminder that meaning doesn’t require permanence.

As conservationists, we tend to chase what will last. Long-term funding. Long-term protections. Long-term datasets. And yet some of the most powerful moments in our careers have been fleeting: a coral spawning night dive that felt like prophecy; a shark tagging that lasted 90 seconds but reshaped a decade of research; the way a mangrove seedling fits in the palm of the hand before becoming an entire coastline; an Indigenous community regaining ancestral land and, with it, the authority to shape its future—an instant that collapses generations of dispossession into a moment of restored possibility.

Impermanence sharpens attention. It anchors us to place. It transforms work from maintenance to participation.

Maybe that’s the real lesson in this artform: you don’t create in spite of impermanence. You create because of it.

Political Impermanence: The Kind That Hurts

Then there’s the other kind of impermanence: the one we don’t celebrate.

The kind where marine protected areas can be undone by the stroke of a pen. The kind where careers of painstaking progress can be swept off the map by an administration chasing extraction or nostalgia for a version of history that never existed. The kind where the deepest seafloor, actual planetary heritage, gets reimagined as a commodity.

Some have watched decades of work reversed overnight. Some have watched colleagues sidelined. Many are watching it happen right now.

This is an impermanence that feels violent because its impacts are permanent: fished-out ocean basins, erased protections, lost species, communities forced back into harm’s way. These aren’t natural cycles; they’re inflicted accelerations.

And yet, even here, there is something to learn: we cannot anchor our hope to policy alone. We anchor it to community. To networks of action that outlast political cycles. To values that do not shift with the tides of elections. To a collective willingness to rebuild, sideways if we must, and to keep showing up.

Impermanence, the cruel kind, reminds us why solidarity and shared purpose matter. Because despair is also contagious, and we need inoculation.

Personal Impermanence: The Work That Shapes Us While It Changes

Every one of us in this field of ocean conservation is a product of impermanence. We are shaped by the species we’ve lost, the reefs we’ve seen decline, the victories that evaporated, the ones that somehow held. Many of us have rebuilt our sense of purpose more times than we care to admit.

The ocean teaches patience, but it also teaches humility.

We don’t get to control outcomes. We only get to influence trajectories. One of the hardest truths is that our life’s work will not be finished by us. Someone else will pick up the rake where we left it. Someone else will redraw the lines.

There is a strange comfort in that, a widening of the time horizon, a softening of the ego. Conservation is a relay, not a monument.

Impermanence as Foundation: A New Kind of Hope

So what do we do with all these forms of impermanence?

We stop fighting impermanence and start using its wisdom. Ecological impermanence teaches us that change is inherent to the ocean’s nature, that resilience isn’t a miracle but a biological strategy written into tide, temperature, and time. Artistic impermanence, especially in works shaped by the tide itself, reminds us to stay awake to beauty and meaning even when they are fleeting, and to recognize that the temporary can be as transformative as anything built to last.

Political impermanence forces us to invest in people rather than policies alone, to build networks of purpose that can withstand the shifting winds of governance. And personal impermanence—our careers, our roles, the work we carry and pass on—reminds us to build movements instead of monuments.

Together, these lessons become the scaffolding for a hope that is not fragile, not naive, and not dependent on the illusion of permanence. It is a hope that can weather tides. A hope that knows how to rebuild. A hope that understands that each moment of action, however small, however fleeting, ripples outward into something larger.

Image © Andres Amador

Perhaps this is the invitation: not to cling to what cannot last, but to recommit to what can move.

Because ocean conservation has always been an art of impermanence; of drawing patterns in shifting sand and trusting that meaning lives not in their endurance, but in the act of creating them together.