There is an aspect of property value as well - dams maintain a certain river level and removal may impact how nice people's river houses are. (Source: Dam near me partly removed, turned into a kayak course.)
It's absurdly funny/weird/scary
So basically all these 100-200yo dams are stuck in this limbo where doing anything with them is a non-starter until they're at the point the government decides they could fail any day now and starts pulling out stops.
Amazing how people just believe assertions because they like them. Anyway, as I told him the typical dam we're talking about here is some mill pond dam that's too small to be federally regulated.
> Two, theres a lot more DuPonts "dying the river blue" than there are good samaritans building fish ladders
If you'd put down your ideology for a second you'd realize that there's more BigCos running through the approval processes to do their sketchy things because the process was built for them. The fish ladder people see the requirements (like non-starter remediation bonds) and realize it's not for them.
The mean, median and modal dam being removed is a low head dam constructed in the early 20th century or before to create a mill pond for some factory. They are almost never federally regulated because they almost never meet the height/size requirements.
https://youtu.be/qcVMX32c0io
I think it's a testament that human activity and nature don't have to be all or nothing, but we need to consider and mitigate the impact of our actions and always leave space for nature.