Are Dams Good Or Bad

Dams contribute to a number of advancements in society. Providing people with water control, electricity, and an abundance of recreational benefits. However, on the downstream of these powerful barriers there are many disasters.
While man made dams are very damaging to the environment and humans, some have the belief that the benefits of man made dams outway the destruction. Dams provide society with a number of social, economic, and environmental advantages. For Example, many boating, skiing, camping, and picnic areas, would not be present without dams. Not only do everyday citizens benefit from the recreational benefits of dams, specifically, farmers benefit from the flood control and irrigation dams provide, about “ten percent of American cropland is irrigated using water stored behind dams,” (). Not only do dams contribute to water control, they also “produce over 103,800 megawatts of renewable electricity and meet 8 to 12 percent of the Nation's power needs,” (). While dams have many benefits they

Dams are built to slow and/or stop water flow, which seems great in flooded uncontrolled rivers, however, “organic materials from within and outside the river that would normally wash downstream get built up behind dams and start to consume a large amount of oxygen as they decompose,” the problem with this is it creates uninhabitable areas downstream, (“The Downside of Dams: Is the Environmental Price of Hydroelectric Power Too High?”). By creating “dead zones”, areas where marine life is unable to survive in the rivers, ecosystems are getting destroyed. By destroying ecosystems, the natural flow of life is disturbed and nature is unable to refix itself at the rate we are destroying it. Dams are created as a source of energy, however sabotaging clean water is not worth the risk because we need water to