It is striking to me that the only locals you seem to care about in your set of responses here are the white locals? Your hypothetical contrast between "remote activists" who want to remove the dams and the "local stalwarts" totally ignores the people who have been most impacted and lost the most through the existence of these dams.

The tribes that relied on the salmon in the klamath watershed lost their jobs, subsistence food, and cultural heritage for nearly a hundred years, and this factors precisely nil in your analysis.