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This is the true story of a showdown between one fearless woman and the nation?s worst polluters. At stake: a town, its people, and a way of life.
A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters, and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas
Chelsea Green Publishing Company
September 2005
400 pages
ISBN: 1931498881
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
The time: the late 1980s. The place: Seadrift, Texas, hard-
luck fishing port. Diane Wilson, forty-one, a fourth-
generation shrimper, had been fishing the bays near her
Gulf Coast town from the age of eight. One morning, while she is running her brother’s fish house
at the docks and mending nets, a fisherman hands her a
newspaper clipping: an EPA study reports that they live in
the most polluted county in the United States. Diane calls
a meeting to discuss what the chemical plants are doing to
the bays. She starts asking questions about Formosa
Plastics, a multi-billion-dollar corporation that has been
silencing workers, flouting the EPA, and dumping lethal
ethylene dichloride and vinyl chloride into the bays. A privately held multinational ruled by its founder,
Formosa Plastics has been prohibited from further expansion
in its native Taiwan, yet Calhoun County officials give it
the red-carpet treatment to build a massive new plant.
Formosa’s Texas cheerleaders include practically every
regulator, judge, businessman, and politician from Corpus
Christi to Austin. This is the searing account of a world where greed and
power trample justice and anyone bold enough to seek and
speak the truth. Wilson takes her fight to the courts, to
the gates of the chemical plant, and to the halls of power
in Austin and Houston. For her efforts she meets with
scorn, bribery, and death threats. Finally, Wilson realizes
that she must break the law to win justice: she resorts to
nonviolent disobedience, direct action, and debilitating
hunger strikes. An Unreasonable Woman is a novelistic tale of heroism and
skulduggery that plays out against a backdrop of colorful
outlaw shrimpers and crooked politicians, enviro-activists
and informants, grudges and murder, betrayal and
redemption. This book heralds the arrival of a vital new
literary voice and introduces us to a daring, hopeful
women’s activism that the times demand.
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