Why are sea turtle important?

From a post on NOAA's Cturtle listserve:

I work in a TV news environment and during Tropical Storm Fay, I was dispatched to the beach (in Palm Beach, Fla. USA) to do a story about the beach erosion and sea turtle nest destruction. Sure enough, the beach was compromised and eggs were blowing all over the beach in the 40 kt winds.

I was covering this story with a reporter who is new to south Florida and not an "outdoors" person. While she was disturbed about the destroyed nests and broken eggs all over the beach, she asked me, "Why are sea turtles so important?" I was taken aback. I can speak volumes about why we need to protect them, but I couldn't answer her question other than to tell her that their abundance is relevant to the health of the sea.

We all love them and are passionate about protecting and conserving them, but seriously, how do you tell somebody (Joe Public) who is not interested why conservation is so important?

I do everything I can to talk to people on the beach and in the water while I'm conducting turtles surveys via snorkel. Seriously, though, how do to you convince a beach-goer to practice conservation if they aren't interested in being in the water?

Look forward to your thoughts.

Here's one response:

. . .maintaining biodiversity in the oceans is critical to maintaining the overall health of the oceans. If, over time, sea turtles go extinct, and then another species goes extinct and so on, then the oceans will end up hosting a monoculture of a certain species as that one species (presumably the dominant one) takes over. By protecting sea turtles we are maintaining the seas' biodiversity, and therefore its health.

And another:

. . . we all know so many reasons that you could point out that can justify the importance of sea turtles. But I think the question some times is not only the sea turtles, it's all environment in general with all it's fauna and flora. What gives us the right to think that our exsitence is more important than other species??

By asking the same question a New York Times columnist ignited a lively debate.