Dec. 13 on The Story: It's difficult to overstate the importance of salmon in the Pacific Northwest. Entire communities, tribal peoples and industries rely on salmon and have done so for generations, and many of them have supported conservation efforts in order to keep salmon around for many generations to come. Despite that, salmon populations have dwindled and haven't shown strong signs of recovering. According to experts, it's difficult to pin down precisely why — the salmon life cycle is complex, and so are the factors that create more adversity for these native species. The result is that there is no silver bullet for the salmon problem. Any solution is going to be a multi-faceted one, restoring conditions to the way they were pre-industrialization as much as humanly possible. Watch more The Story videos: http://bit.ly/watchTheStory Follow The Story on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheStoryKGW Follow The Story on Instagram: https://instagram.com/thestorykgw