For three decades, Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation shrimper from Seadrift, has been trying to hold Formosa Plastics accountable for its pollution in Texas. Polyvinyl chloride powder from the plant dusted everything in town when she was young, and by the 1980s, more and more sick and mutated fish were showing up in locals’ catches. In 1989, Wilson learned Calhoun County had the most toxic pollution of any county nationally, according to EPA rankings.
What followed was a harrowing fight to clean up industry on the Gulf Coast and save her beloved Lavaca Bay, with a series of hunger strikes, arrests, legal action, and books (her first is titled An Unreasonable Woman.) Even as family and friends shunned Wilson for going against the county’s biggest employer, she persisted. Wilson became a staunch ally of the region’s Vietnamese fishermen, who in the early 1980s were targeted by the Ku Klux Klan for supposedly encroaching on white fishermen’s territory—when pollution was the real culprit behind dwindling commercial fisheries.
Finally, in 2019, Wilson was vindicated with a historic $50 million settlement from Formosa for its pervasive plastic nurdle pollution. Her victory was the largest-ever settlement won by a citizen from an industrial polluter under the federal Clean Water Act. Formosa has been ordered to cease discharging plastic nurdles in its wastewater, and clean up the plastic that’s accumulated over decades in Lavaca Bay, Matagorda Bay, and Cox’s Creek. Wilson donated the whole settlement to a trust, to be used for a variety of environmental causes.
