Reply #15: Inert? Hardly.

[Xithras]

Dams change the temperature of the water, permanently destroying native fish stocks. That fact is largely irrelevant since they also block upstream migration for spawning. Those pesky floods replenish wetlands at the river delta, which will now begin to erode and vanish since both the seasonal high water flows and sediment are trapped by the dams. Bird habitat and wetlands along the river will rapidly vanish since the removed flooding threat will now open previously dangerous areas to farming and development.

If you want to know what dams do, visit the California Central Valley and stop by any one of our rivers. When John Muir and other early settlers visited them, the rivers were described as lush examples of natures bounty, with beavers, huge rabbit colonies, dense riparian forests, hundreds of miles of adjoining wetlands, and fish runs so dense that some claimed a person could walk across the river without getting wet...by stepping on the fish backs. In the late 1800's the rivers in the valley ran so high that steamboats regularly ran from San Francisco to cities like Modesto, Fresno, and many smaller farm burghs.

Today? Rivers like the Tuolumne are sterile because of the dams. So much water and soil are impounded that the spawning beds for the fish are gone. The riparian forests dried out and were cut down. There haven't been beavers here in a century, and the last Salmon run clocked a couple hundred...which really doesn't matter since there's a DAM between them and their traditional spawning area. And those steamboats? My property backs up to the Stanislaus river. During the summer, I can walk across the thing and not get my knees wet.

Ecosystems don't "adjust" when dams are built, they die.