Aldo Leopold, the brilliant forester turned ecologist who wrote the landmark book, Sand County Almanac described the great challenge he and others like him, who had an ecological education, faced when viewing the human effects on the natural ecosystems that surround them. “One lives alone in a world of wounds,” he wrote.

No one lives this phrase more than Robert Lackey, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Oregon State University researcher who headed the Salmon 2100 project in 2006. His independent team of scientists released the Salmon 2100 report that said everyone in the Pacific Northwest are going to have to do more if wild salmon are to survive the next hundred years.

The report was among the most pessimistic assessments of the future of salmon in the region you will ever read. Essentially it says that the region’s population expected to more than double in that time, human demands for water, power and land that is now prime salmon habitat will overwhelm current efforts to save the fish.

To save the fish Lackey says we have to overcome the drive for economic efficiency, the increasing scarcity and competition for key natural resources, especially for high-quality water; the rising population and our collective and individual choices.

“It’s up to the public to decide on the tradeoffs that are necessary if wild salmon are to continue in significant numbers throughout this century,” Lackey told me.

Lackey didn’t want to talk about breaching dams or other specifics when I interviewed him back them. None of the individual actions that were the center of the debate at the time were relevant enough to him. In essence, what he was saying is that the road to salmon recovery was so much steeper than the public was even willing to discuss that first it had to realize just how bad the wounds of the world were.

Take salmon advocates and Indian tribes, for instance. These groups seem prepared to do more than any of the other elements in society to restore salmon. Yet they still support continued fishing even of endangered species.

Already Lackey work has spawned a new effort. Former Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber, who heads the Portland-based Wild Salmon Center is now leading an effort to save the best salmon habitat left, so-called , "salmon strongholds."

I have my own problems with Lackey’s message. I am by nature an optimist and have a hard time accepting that we cannot fix something if we set our minds to it.

But Lackey said he and his team of scientists were neither pessimistic nor optimistic.

“Nearly all the participants in the Project concluded that current recovery efforts overall will not be successful, but it is important to remember that all of them also concluded that there are viable policy options available. These policy options might be radical and they all surely would be difficult to implement, but there are policy options that have a good chance of restoring wild salmon runs to significant, sustainable levels through 2100 and beyond,” he said.

The major issue Pacific Northwest residents must resolve is how much of a priority is having salmon in their lives?