Meet environmentalist Diane Wilson,
a prophet without honor in her own land

By María Eugenia Guerra

I met Texas environmentalist and political activist Diane Wilson when she was a guest on DriveTime, the weekday public affairs radio show I host on 1490 AM. I had coffee with her at Espumas the evening before the radio show and began the interview there.
Diane Wilson was fasting in solidarity with three Dominican nuns who had been arrested and incarcerated for protesting a nuclear munitions dump site in Colorado. She was in Laredo to speak about environmental activism to several classes at Texas A&M International University.
In the course of our interviews on and off the air, I got a picture of the life of a woman formed by the place where she lived on the Gulf -- the tiny Texas town of Seadrift -- but I also got a picture of a life lived large and sometimes far from the bay -- as far away as Taiwan, India, and Iraq.
"The water was a woman, like my grandmother. My identity has always been with the water," Wilson said of her life on the Gulf of Mexico as a fourth generation commercial shrimper and the last of the fishing net builders. Wilson's broad, flat hands moved as she spoke in a way that suggested the flight of pelicans low over water.
It was the environmental degradation of the bay waters at Seadrift by the industrial giants that had found a home in Calhoun County that galvanized Wilson's personal evolution into a champion of the environment. Armed with an Associated Press story about the toxicity of the Gulf and the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission's Toxic Release Inventory for that area, Wilson sought to mobilize Seadrift in a united front against the industrial discharges of Formosa Plastics, Union Carbide, and Alcoa Aluminum. She led the charge, but hardly anyone followed. Most of Seadrift's residents were dependent on the chemical plants for jobs or contracts and were unwilling to consider that the arsenic and benzene their employers discharged into the air and the estuaries that fed into the bay had anything to do with the health of the community or the fishing industry.
"I was pressured to back down by my family, by other shrimpers, by plant workers, by my banker," Wilson recalled. "My dog was shot. My marriage broke apart. I lost my home. I lost my boat. The Coast Guard called me a terrorist when I tried to sink my boat on an illegal discharge. The Houston paper called me Public Enemy Number One." Remembering her youth as a loner without a well-defined sense of herself, Wilson said that speaking up for the environment was uncharacteristic of her. "I had always been petrified to speak out, but I had this passion about the water, like it was real. It was like stepping out of who I had been to find myself. Just as I realized I liked myself and was telling my husband this he was telling me, 'I'm not liking this person you've become,'" she said.
Divorced, Wilson continued to fish alone in the Gulf to feed her five children. "It wasn't a typical way to be a mother, but I taught them to stand up and to think for themselves," she said. Wilson remembered the moment she realized her boat had been sabotaged. "A squall had come up and I thought the boat was pretty low in the water. When I went to run the bilge pump I could see that the wires had been jerked from the pump. I was going to sink. It's dark and cramped in that hold. I had to do everything by feel. But I made it back," she said, adding, "I can't swim."
Diane Wilson chained herself to a Union Carbide smokestack, embarrassing the company with the news that its security system was easily breached. "I was up there for two hours until I was removed by a SWAT team and charged with criminal trespass and resisting arrest, which I did not," she said.
Wilson was relentless in generating bad publicity for the industrial giants that in addition to Union Carbide, Formosa Plastics, and Alcoa Aluminum also included DuPont and British Petroleum/Amoco. "I was now networking with union members about plant safety. The movement just grew larger," she said.
"It's the permit hearings that get them and the studies. That's when the bad publicity about their environmental practices surfaces," she said. "It took five years to get Formosa Plastics, a Taiwanese company, to come into zero discharge compliance. It took five minutes to get Alcoa Aluminum. I was able to stop a Formosa rayon plant from being built in Louisiana, a plant that would use as its raw materials all the hardwoods it could harvest in the area," she continued.
For Wilson the fight for justice has broadened since she first voiced her environmental opinion in Seadrift 15 years before. She was in Iraq just before the United States launched its attack on the sovereign nation. She was there with Code Pink (Women for Peace), an organization of women affiliated with UnReasonable Women for the Earth, which Wilson founded with Nina Simons, co-founder of the environmental group Bioneers. Code Pink is nurse chat for "the baby has been abducted."
Dressed in pink, Wilson was most recently arrested outside the White House as she climbed a fence to better position a banner for a Code Pink peace march and fast.
Wilson has been featured in stories in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, 48 Hours, E Magazine, and Lifetime TV. She has been inducted into the Environmental Hall of Fame and was named a Mother Jones Hell Raiser.
Wilson and her struggle to save the bay at Seadrift are the subject of a beautiful children's book, Nobody Particular, by Helen Caldecott-winner Molly Bang. The book is banned from schools in Seadrift.
"I live on faith and I live on the edge," said Wilson, a prophet without honor in her own land.

I'm a skeptic, jaded over years by interview after interview with individuals who fancy themselves radicals, heroes, or visionaries. It is that skepticism perhaps that puts teeth into my writing. It is my job as a journalist to scrutinize bigger-than-life figures for flaws, to pull them into the light and away from the shadows that are kind to self-proclaimed legends. It is my job to ask the questions that reveal them less surefooted and more human.
When all the talking was done for this interview with environmentalist Diane Wilson, I understood that I had met a true champion of the environment. I understood that in the tiny coastal town of Seadrift, Texas there lives a selfless, heroic, much-heralded woman, who though ordinary in demeanor and conversation, has committed her life to peace, political change, and environmental stewardship.
I understood I had met a woman formed by a place, a woman whose inner voice resonated with the tidal ebb and flow of the bay waters at Seadrift.