Comment by macNchz

> They claim that somehow hundreds of unique kinds of river/lake fish escaped notice for centuries, that this happens every year, and each one of those kinds of fish is critical to preserve. Is this plausible?

I don't disagree with the premise that environmental laws are being abused by people with ancillary agendas, but arguably humans have been underestimating the complexity of ecological systems for generations, incorrectly assuming that we understand everything well enough to manage and control our impacts without long tail side effects.

It may well be plausible that there are many hundreds of undiscovered fish species out there, and that interfering with any subset of them could cascade into other consequences. We've certainly been learning a lot about the impacts of dams on fisheries in recent years—changes made centuries ago that had profound long term effects on our food supply, to take a tangible example.