Good for the fish but as winters get warmer these dams will be useful to store rain that doesn't stay put in the mountains as winter snow. This might mean more summer droughts. Also a nice clean source of power. I would rather see fish ladders.
Likely yes. Different times, different sensibilities. But also there’s always a range of opinions even among experts. How long did it take medicine to agree on tobacco use and whether an egg is healthy?
They knew what would happen. They just didn't have modern values. People would rather make them out to be stupid than admit that anyone at any point looked at the tradeoff and decided the dam would benefit everyone enough more than the ecosystem to be worth it.
Yes and no. Most of the dam removals are 100-200yo old low head damns that fed mill ponds so they weren't really holding anything back when there was high demand.
Thaaaaaat said, moving from "slap up a damn somewhere" based stormwater management to local stormwater management is probably gonna go down in history as one of the biggest boondoggles in the history of environmentalism in the wet eastern half of the country (the desert west where aquifer replenishment is a concern is a different story)
At this point there isn’t much additional space you could dam without adverse impacts. The flood barriers for New York at the mouth to the Atlantic were rejected both for being too costly and for screwing everyone outside the dams.
