Ah, yes, terrible consequences, such as, the irrigation and suitability for farmland of central California, the lack of frequent flooding of the Mississippi river and tributaries and the present dryness of the Netherlands.
I don't think draining the everglades is tractable and I think it's more valuable as is since you're not gonna out farm the midwest. But it's really easy to be on a high horse and not appreciate the successful projects that we benefit from the results of.
_The Great River_ by Boyce Upholt from last year is a good place to start learning about the Mississippi.
The unsustainable irrigation that's draining aquifers during droughts and causing permanent damage[1] to groundwater retention? The irrigation that's causing changes in land topography[2]?
> the lack of frequent flooding of the Mississippi river
You mean the system which is a well known ecological disaster?[3][4][5]
And no frequent flooding? Since 2017, the Mississippi River Corridor Critical Area (which covers only a small portion of the watershed) has seen the USDA pay out $11.4 billion[6] to cover damages from flooding. I live in the watershed and for most of the summer I get flood alerts every time it rains. Damages are on the news constantly. In 2008, a tributary river flooded so badly it destroyed two mid-sized cities in Iowa[7]. Then you have the the 2011 flooding[8] of the Mississippi which was the most disastrous since before most modifications had been made to the river. Lack of frequent flooding? Just because you don't hear about it doesn't mean it's not happening.
Like what are we talking about here? Even reaching for what you assume to be innocuous examples, empirically observable negative consequences hang off of them like fruiting bodies. Who knows what the consequences will look like in 100-200 years when they've had time to iteratively feed back into themselves.
[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30197456/
[2] - https://www.usgs.gov/centers/land-subsidence-in-california
[3] - https://repository.lsu.edu/geo_pubs/2126/
[4] - https://repository.lsu.edu/geo_pubs/1614/
[5] - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/03/230306143336.h...
[6] - https://www.ewg.org/research/usda-policies-fall-short-helpin...
[7] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_flood_of_2008
[8] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Mississippi_River_floods