The Sea Is Watching

A postcard usually enhances the reality. The contrast is more stark in Corinna, Maine, a former woolen mill town on the shores of Lake Sebasticook, where years of dumping of industrial waste contaminated the water supply. In 1964, E.B. White mourned his fellow Mainer Rachel Carson and the altered ecology of Sebasticook. Carson’s work mobilized the public and led to the formation of the US Environmental Protection Agency. Yet local people continued to seek regulation and revival of Sebasticook for twenty more years before the EPA began cleaning up Corinna.