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We need to do a better job of keeping oceans healthy.

We need to respect the oceans and take care of them as if our lives depended on it. Because they do.

The oceans are more or less in disrepair. Long Beach really is making an effort to acknowledge this, and that's a great place to start. I'm trying to spread at least the knowledge that it's never too early to take care of our oceans and our environment.

Oceans are one of the most important things in the world now and that is a national security threat of the United States of America, to be honest with you. That is why seeing the habitat destroyed is so short-sighted by us.

Oil is drowning our oceans and drowning our boreal forests.

Our oceans are facing innumerable threats - from overfishing and pollution to ocean acidification and invasive species - yet we haven't had a blueprint for its use and development, incredible as that seems.

Our oceans have been the victims of a giant Ponzi scheme, waged with Bernie Madoff-like callousness by the world's fisheries.

As a child, I was aware of the widely-held attitude that the ocean is so big, so resilient that we could use the sea as the ultimate place to dispose of anything we did not want, from garbage and nuclear wastes to sludge from sewage to entire ships that had reached the end of their useful life.

The oceans produce up to 70 percent of our oxygen, they shape our climate, and they support an American oceans economy larger than our nation's entire agriculture sector.

I think people really understand that clean air and clean water and not having factories dumping their emissions into the atmosphere and into the rivers and into the sea has been a very good thing for America. EPA stands watch for very important principles that go all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt.