A devilish brew of chemicals and sewage turned the Kennebec River into a toxic wash, over the last 150 years.

Dams did their part by strangling its spawning habitats and crushing its fish runs. Farming pushed soil and fertilizers into the river ecosystem.

With all of that came turbidity and turmoil in the river’s nutrient systems. Now the Kennebec ecosystem has given way to “ altered stable states” in which pollution-tolerant species, both plant and animal, have moved in to fill ecological voids.

The feeding habits of invasive carp, for example, now disturb the riverbed and adversely determine what can grow and hatch there.

The river’s abuse led to a lethal level of toxic morbidity during the 20th century, but was saved by the Clean Water Act of the 1970s and by the work of scientists who, for the last 50 years, have not let go of their mission to test, measure, and make it better, scientists like Slade Moore of Biological Conservation and Jaret Reblin of Bowdoin College, most recently.

Together Moore and Reblin compiled “ The Kennebec Estuary: Restoration Challenges and Opportunities,” a comprehensive report on the river’s metabolism, nutrients, salinity, mud and sand “communities,” toxic contaminants, and susceptibility to climate change.

But even under scientific care, there is not always a robust response from the river itself. Some of its inherent resilience has atrophied, it seems.

It is very hard, if not impossible, to get back to the river’s original state in which fish runs of alewives dazzled, commercial striped bass fishing boomed, and thousands upon thousands of waterfowl overshadowed Merrymeeting Bay, for example.

While we must thank the environmentalists for their work, the lay reader cannot read the report without a feeling of helplessness. For it hangs abstractly in the laboratory, behind a curtain of statistics.

One is left with a sense of the problem that is devoid of the subjective and personal passion that must also play a part in this river’s recovery. Surely the health and beauty of the Kennebec River is not just a matter of scientific analysis. It must also be the object of love and respect.

For ecology, in the final analysis, means that we live in a web and not in isolation one from another, and not apart from the rivers and oceans of the world. It is this kind of radical shift in perception that is most necessary now.

Unfortunately, the report stops short of sparking any such psychological or spiritual agency in the recovery of the Kennebec. What is missing is a reading on the deep ecology of the thing, and a warning that we must change our lives.

The report was commissioned by the Kennebec Estuary Land Trust and is available for $10 through its website: kennebecestuary.org.

BRAD MILLER lives in Phippsburg during the summer with his wife, Lynn. He is an independent writer. His permanent home is Rochester, N.Y.