Diane Wilson: unreasonable woman, tireless activist
by Vicki Wolf

“I could see the water. . . she was a woman, a grandmother with long grey hair. She was real, she had a personality and she always welcomed me to the bay,” says Diane Wilson about her first childhood memories of the water and Lavaca Bay. Wilson was helping her father on his shrimp boat by the time she was eight years old. She was the first woman to captain her own boat in Lavaca Bay. It is Wilson’s passion for water, the bay and shrimping that has given her the courage and energy to face large multinational corporations to save the bay and to stand up for people and the environment around the world.

“In 1989, shrimping was so bad, I left my boat and worked at my brother’s fish house and dealt with fishermen all day long,” Wilson says. She heard their stories and learned that one shrimper, in his 40’s, had three types of cancer. He gave Wilson a news story about the Toxic Release Inventory that rated counties in the United States for emissions and hazardous toxins. She learned her small county of 15,000 people, Calhoun, was No. 1 in the nation for toxic disposal. “That information nearly knocked me down,” Wilson says. “This county has never been known for anything.”

This realization changed Wilson’s life. She called a meeting and started her new life as an activist. “It snowballed. Unknown to me, Formosa Plastics (then one of the major polluters of the bay) was putting in a large expansion facility to make polyvinylchloride.”

Wilson learned to navigate red tape and bureaucracy to get information from industry and government. She endured “water” meetings where discussions centered on how the bay could be used for processing waste. “They discussed how much chemical can be disbursed. They liked to say ‘dilution is the solution.’ They didn’t value the bay,” Wilson says. “Violations and history show they don’t care about anything but profit and bottom line – they were going to kill the bay.”

Wilson took her concerns about toxic discharge to Formosa and they ignored her. She captured their attention when she tried to sink her shrimp boat in the area of the illegal discharge. Wilson persisted, and eventually managed to get Formosa and Alcoa to significantly reduce the amount of toxins they discharge into the bay.

“It all has to do with commitment and intent. Most people don’t truly understand what commitment means,” Wilson says. “It’s powerful. It has magic. It’s a key to the universe.” Wilson ponders the idea of commitment a bit more and says, “It has a touch of risk. You create change.”

When interviewed for this profile, Wilson was beginning her sixth hunger strike in support of the people of Bhopal. A tragic leak at Union Carbide’s pesticide manufacturing plant, now owned by Dow Chemical, in 1984 near Bhopal, India exposed half a million people to methyl isocynate and other toxic gases. The gases seriously injured as many as 600,000 people. At least 20,000 people have died from the exposure. Ground water is still highly contaminated. Wilson was the only U.S. citizen to attend the People’s Tribunal in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1992 to support the international call for justice and restitution for Bhopal survivors.

Other actions of civil disobedience have landed Wilson in jail 15 times. Her longest incarceration was for three months. “That is a pitiful, pitiful place,” Wilson says. “If that is any indication of our civilization, we are on a downhill course – the people sitting in the jail are the poorest of the poor – black and Hispanic women,” she adds. Her experience in jail has inspired Wilson to take on yet another cause. She is starting an advocacy group for women in jails. “Some people say six months or a year in jail isn’t long. But that’s long enough to wreck a life or break up a family,” Wilson says. “There are lots of suicides.”

Wilson says she is not the best type of person to be an activist or a leader because the work involves a lot of technical information, and she says she is not good at being around people. When people call and ask how to take action for a cause she tells them, “Call a meeting. Make a phone call.”

“I never planned anything: I just had intent, and was willing to put myself at risk,” Wilson says. “We are the wealthiest people on earth. We take most of the resources and have the heaviest ecological footprint,” she adds. “We have a duty as Americans to make it right – to correct these wrongs.”

Wilson is the mother of five grown children. She finds solitude living alone in a small mobile home in Seadrift, Texas when she is not traveling. Her current projects include protesting the Iraq war with Cindy Sheehan and other peace activists and trying to reopen the superfund site in Lavaca Bay to study the health effects of mercury on families of fishing people in the area.

Wilson says this life as an activist makes her happy. “When I was young, I didn’t like myself. Now I like myself really well. I’ve lost my house, I’ve lost my marriage, I’ve lost my boat, and I’m a happy person,” she says. “It’s the journey that matters and not so much the goal.”

Wilson tells her story in her book, “An Unreasonable Woman: A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas” and in the award-winning documentary, “Texas Gold.”

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