Everyone Needs the Oceans to Be Protected

Most people will never glimpse the vast underwater mountains and canyons off Cape Cod that President Barack Obama designated as a national monument Thursday. The same goes for the hundreds of thousands of submerged square miles that the U.K., Ecuador, Costa Rica and other countries have just protected, and for the half-million square miles near Hawaii that Obama recently set aside.

But everyone benefits when underwater tracts are put off limits to commercial fishing and mining, because doing so is one of the best ways to help marine life flourish. It's not just us humans: The seas are home to 80 percent of all species on the planet, and that's not counting all the other creatures, including 3 billion people, that directly rely on the ocean for their food.