Diane Wilson, a 77-year-old who once made her living catching shrimp, has spent decades confronting chemical companies along the Texas Gulf Coast, Inside Climate News reported.
Wilson runs San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper, a nonprofit working to protect coastal waters near Seadrift, Texas, where she grew up.
Her mission involves pressuring corporations to stop contaminating the bays and estuaries that supported her family's livelihood for generations.
She first took on industrial polluters in the 1980s. Two decades later, she was jailed for about 90 days after mounting a smokestack at Dow's Seadrift facility in protest.
That persistence led to a major victory in 2019: her long campaign against Formosa Plastics ended with a settlement exceeding $100 million, covering fines, facility improvements, and cleanup work.
Wilson is now targeting Dow.
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She filed legal documents announcing her plan to sue the company for releasing plastic pellets, called nurdles, from its sprawling chemical facility into nearby waters. Her volunteers have boated through industrial waterways for years to document the contamination.
What they found was striking.
In two brief collection sessions near Dow's discharge points, her team recovered 23 pounds of plastic pellets combined. Wilson described watching pellets blanket the water from shore to shore.
Funds from her 2023 Goldman Environmental Prize, a $200,000 award, funded much of this work, and she brought on a family friend to pilot a boat.
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Majorly 😥 His young granddaughter proved ideal for scooping samples from the muddy banks; she was small enough to move across the soggy terrain without getting stuck. Wilson later brought on a teen from the area, who now heads out multiple times a week to continue collecting.
For Seadrift residents and fishing families, Wilson's work means someone is standing up for their health and their way of life.
"It takes going out all the time," Wilson said in an interview with Inside Climate News. "We're still collecting. And we will be collecting. And every time we go out there there are pellets. Every time."
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