NO LESS THAN RAIL roads, bridges, or cities, dams embody the American ideal of progress. In New England, as early as the seventeenth century, they converted falling water into industrial power. In the Tennessee Valley in the 1930s hydroelectric dams lifted the region out of poverty. In the Southeast, dams made swampland habitable. And in the West they tamed one of the wildest and most mountainous regions on earth. The nation currently has more than 75,000 dams more than six feet tall, nearly one for every day since independence. Yet there have been few folk songs about them, few artists inspired by them, and few romantic tales of their construction. Worse still, for a technology that had its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s, they are already falling into disfavor.

As Elizabeth Grossman details in Watershed: The Undamming of America (Counterpoint Press, 248 pages, $27.00), in many cases the argument for demolition seems clear-cut. On Wisconsin’s numerous rivers, scores of dams built for long-gone factories—some of them subsequently converted to generate small amounts of electricity—have deteriorated to the point where it would cost more to fix them than to remove them. Meanwhile, they have sharply cut fish populations and interfered with other natural processes that require swift-running water.

In north-central Florida the Rodman Dam was built in 1968 as part of an ambitious canal project that was canceled three years later. Although the reason for its construction no longer exists, it continues to drastically reduce water flow in the Ocklawaha River, kill manatees that get crushed in its gates, and pollute the area’s groundwater, among other offenses.

Yet almost everywhere she goes, the author encounters opposition to dam removal, sometimes overwhelming. Just as a bridge or canal or industrial building can become a cherished part of the scenery, some people find their local dams to be beautiful. Moreover, communities have grown up around the slack water that dams create—both the lakes and reservoirs behind them and the placid streams in front. It’s incontestable that dams destroy ecosystems, but so do houses and lawns and urban parks. The argument over dam demolition sometimes boils down to pitting the interests of boaters, swimmers, water-skiers, and lake fishermen against those of hikers and stream fishermen.

The first few chapters of Watershed are fairly well balanced. Grossman lets her opponents speak for themselves, like the Floridian who cites positive ecological effects from the Rodman Dam and says, “Flooding the river for the reservoir was the wrong thing to do. But the reservoir’s been here for thirty-five years and people enjoy it.” As the author moves west, however, she grows more and more polemical, to the point where she seems never to have met a dam she didn’t hate. By her last stop she can sweepingly dismiss the usefulness of four dams on the lower Snake River that generate 5 percent of the entire Northwest’s electricity and permit navigation from Lewiston, Idaho, to the Pacific.

The question of dam removal is an important one, taking in issues of habitat conservation, changes in industry, the ownership of natural resources, Indian rights, the claims of local residents against those of the larger community, and even the very notion of progress. Many past dam projects would never have been started in today’s more ecologically aware conditions, and at least some of them could probably be removed with no great loss. Grossman’s book is a significant contribution to the debate, but a little more willingness to see things from the other side would have made it a lot more convincing.