Environmental Justice in the US - Part 3
Diane Wilson
I really enjoyed having Diane Wilson join Zero (Link to conversation). She is a fourth-generation shrimper, former boat captain, author – published Unreasonable Woman, and mother of five. Her family has lived as fishermen along the Texas gulf coast for over 130 years. She has launched environmental campaigns, demonstrations, hunger strikes, and climbed towers in the fight against local industrial polluters that make her rural Texas Gulf Coast community one of the most polluted in the country. You can learn more about her work as an activist here. Diane also received the 2023 Goldman Environmental Prize. A video featuring her efforts and award can be found here.
She joined the podcast last month to discuss her connection to the San Antonio Bay Estuary, her fight against contamination in her community, the power of civil disobedience, and her successful $50m lawsuit against Formosa Plastics. While I found all of these topics fascinating, I want to focus this post on civil disobedience as she is actively undergoing a hunger strike to demand justice for the victims of Formosa Plastics Group.
I was amazed at Diane’s willingness to put her body and life on the line as she stood up for what she believed in and against the petrochemical companies surrounding her community. She spoke at length of the various forms of civil disobedience she’s led, including disrupting BP’s shareholder meeting following the Deepwater Horizon Spill in 2010, sinking her boat on a Formosa Plastics wastewater outfall in protest of its practices of releasing toxic chemicals into the local estuary, or going on numerous hunger strikes.
Diane spoke vividly of the feeling of strength she gained by putting herself in an uncomfortable situation, even mentioning that civil disobedience helped her “gain her soul.”
Civil Disobedience
Diane began her fight to protect the bays in 1989 when she was working at a fish house. That was when it was announced that Formosa Plastics was planning the biggest plastic expansion that Texas had ever had and the biggest in the United States in 10 years. Formosa Plastics was bringing their plant expansion to Texas because the villagers in Taiwan where Formosa wanted to build their plant were furious at Formosa for all their pollution and were literally throwing stones at the company to keep them from building there.
Diane has been fighting Formosa plastics, Texas and their pollution for 35 years. She has mainly used civil disobedience to try to get Formosa to do the right thing. She has done three hunger strikes, organized demonstrations, did sit-ins in front of their facility, and has even taken her shrimp boat out to sink it on top of Formosa's illegal discharge pipe in Lavaca Bay.
In 2016, Diane Wilson and a handful of injured workers and desperate fishermen spent two years collecting Formosa’s plastic pollution as evidence. They collected 2,500 samples and took eight thousand photos. They went to court in 2019 and won a 50-million-dollar settlement, the largest citizen clean water suit in US history. They also won zero discharge of plastic, monitoring, clean up, and enforcement. Currently, Formosa has violated their permit 510 times and been fined 12.5 million dollars.
In the next post, we’ll dive into Diane’s current hunger strike and International Monitor Formosa Alliance’s efforts.
Thanks for following the season.
What were your thoughts and impressions? Feel free to comment below or send questions to infopodcastzero@gmail.com