Why an Activist From Texas Crossed the World to Confront Asia’s Biggest Petrochemical Company
Key takeaways
- YUNLIN COUNTY, Taiwan—In many ways, at nearly 80 years old, Diane Wilson would have rather stayed home.
- She smiled as she discovered how much they had in common.
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June 10, 2026 Share This Article Republish Diane Wilson (right), Sharon Lavigne (left) and Nancy Bui display pictures of Vietnamese activists jailed for demanding reparations over the Formosa Plastics’ 2016 chemical spill disaster on May 28 in Taipei. Credit: Dylan Baddour/Inside Climate News Related A Hunger Strike Ends, but an ‘Unreasonable’ Woman’s Battle Against Corporate Polluters Marches On Dow Asks Texas to Legalize Plastic Pollution From Its Seadrift Complex Texas Alleges ‘Habitual Non-Compliance’ of Wastewater Rules at Dow Chemical Complex Share This Article Republish Most Popular New BLM Grazing Rules Eliminate Tribal Buffalo From Public Lands A Water Crisis Has The ‘Poster Boys’ of Iowa Farming Ready to Talk Regulation Dolphins, Sharks, Turtles and Workers Are All Victims of Unregulated Squid Fleets The Resistance, Part 2: Three Gulf Coast environmentalists confront Formosa Plastics Corp. at its shareholders meeting.
YUNLIN COUNTY, Taiwan—In many ways, at nearly 80 years old, Diane Wilson would have rather stayed home. A retired shrimper with a high school education, she agreed to come here without thinking too much, as usual. That’s how she does things.
That’s why she’d spent all of March camped outside a chemical plant on a hunger strike near her tiny Gulf Coast town in Texas, and why now she was on a dock in Taiwan listening to a gray-haired oysterman speak in Mandarin.