Walk along the beach on some areas of California (Santa Barbara comes to mind) and the oil is seeping up through the sand. Whether they like it or not, oil IS part of the environment, just like seaweed.
Oil in the ocean has been around as long as recorded history. Even when the concentration is too high, nature has a marvelous capacity to recover.
Is anyone still talking all the oil Saddam purposely dumped in the Persian Gulf in the closing days of the first Gulf War? Or even the millions of barrels which BP actually released when their platform in the Gulf of Mexico went kaput just four years ago?