> How many people are impacted and how? Will they lose their businesses, jobs, and life savings?

A good place to start would be an economic analysis of all the people downstream, all the cultures and livelihoods that were lost due to the installation of the dam in the first place.

The dam was only up for less than a century, yet your statement implicitly assumes the water now belongs to those who control the dam. To claim that the dam beneficiaries are somehow the victims and the downstream communities are the bad guys for wanting their livelihoods back - preposterous and disingenuous.

Let's correct your error: the river has been feeding downstream cultures for centuries. Fishing on the Klamath was at one point a livelihood supporting tens of thousands of people. The dams (combined with the timber industry) have completely decimated the salmon habitat and the fishing industry with it. Those who installed the dam and used it did so explicitly to take resources from one place and use them for their own benefit. We have a word for that - theft. And now they're being asked to return those resources. The horror! Spare me the crocodile tears.

> The closest it comes is talking about the spotted owl, where 30,000 people lost their livelihoods without compensation

This is absolutely nothing like the spotted owl situation. This attitude of people vs nature is a false dichotomy. Salmon have cultural, economic, and nutritional value that makes them a keystone resource for those communities. The issue is not the salmon's survival, it's the survival of the people who depended on them.