Diana Wilson ： Formosa Plastics 反対運動
Diane Wilson, who has
protested the company, said a serious incident was inevitable.
"When Formosa was building this plant we had so much
evidence about the shoddy way it was put together and the poor
quality of the work," said Wilson, who was in New York City
promoting her first book An Unreasonable
Woman,
about her fight against large petrochemical companies. "I'm
not surprised at all."
（http://www.click2houston.com/news/5069360/detail.html）
The Front
http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1991/05/mm0591_04.html
Taiwan Brings Toxics to
Texas IN A VICTORY FOR a tiny, embattled environmental movement
in Calhoun County, Texas, the Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) delayed granting the Taiwan-based Formosa Plastics
Corporation the wastewater discharge permits it needs to begin
operations at the company's newly expanded facilities.
The EPA announced in February 1991 that it is requiring the
preparation of an environmental impact statement before it will
grant the permits. Formosa Plastics, Taiwan's largest chemical
producer, has a history of environmental degradation and
violations both in Taiwan and in its plants in the United States.
The company is currently in the midst of expanding its 800-
employee plant in Point Comfort, about 100 miles southwest of
Houston. The new seven-plant facility will be the largest
petrochemical factory built in the United States in a decade, and
will produce more than 1.5 billion pounds of chemicals each year.
Formosa plans to start up operations in the first of the
completed plants in spring 1992. Formosa predicts that the $1.5
billion expansion will provide 4,000 jobs at the peak of the
construction phase and will create 1,200 permanent jobs in the
economically depressed Calhoun County. Currently, 2,600 workers
are employed constructing the plant. Employment levels around
Point Comfort plummeted in the 1980s as the region's commercial
fishing, agriculture and oil industries declined and local
chemical plants laid off workers. In 1986, the unemployment level
reached 15.8 percent. Texas politicians and local economic
developers responded enthusiastically to Formosa's expansion
plans--so enthusiastically, in fact, that the company has
received close to $170 million in tax breaks and direct subsidies
from the state and local governments for locating the new plant
in Calhoun County.
Not everyone in Point Comfort welcomes the idea of a new Formosa
facility, however. Diane Wilson founded the Calhoun County
Resource Watch (CCRW) in 1989 to oppose the expansion plan
because she feared the potential environmental effects. Wilson
has hooked up with Texans United, a statewide environmental
organization, to fight Formosa, but in Point Comfort she remains
virtually a one-woman opposition force, with little support from
the community, the local press or government. Her tactics--
picketing, a hunger strike and what she calls the
"harassment" of local environmental commissioners--have
alienated many of her neighbors, but she remains committed
"to waking them up" to the dangers posed by the
company's presence.
Wilson's activities have drawn public attention to Formosa's
complete disregard for the environment in the United States and
in Taiwan, where Formosa has been confronted with an increasingly
strong environmental movement. Texans United reports that in
December 1990 over 20,000 people demonstrated in Taipai and the
county of I-Lan to protest a $7 billion Formosa chemical complex
proposed for Taiwan. Wilson, who visited Taiwan last year, says
her concern with Formosa extends beyond the company's operations
in Texas. "I saw what they do to their motherland--it
outraged me. I don't want Formosa in the solar system."
In Point Comfort, Formosa has been hit with two of the largest
environmental fines in Texas history. In spring 1990, the Texas
Water Commission fined the company $247,000 for 17 violations
over a three-year period, including improper storage of oil and
other waste, cracked wastewater retention ponds and releases of
extremely acidic wastewater into surface water. In October 1990,
the five-state Region Six office of the EPA handed Formosa a
proposed $8.3 million fine for illegal disposal of hazardous
waste. Formosa settled the fine with the EPA earlier this year
for $3,375,000.
Formosa's facility in neighboring Louisiana has been fined
several times since 1987 for excessive releases of vinyl
chloride. In 1986, a Delaware judge ordered a six-week shutdown
of a Formosa plant in that state in response to a vinyl chloride
monomer release so extreme that the factory's sprinkler system
went off and employees were forced to wear breathing equipment.
Vinyl chloride has been linked to liver, stomach and brain
cancer, miscarriages and birth defects; it is one of only seven
chemicals for which there are specific EPA emission standards.
Formosa's international record make Texas environmentalists
especially concerned about its proposed expanded operations at
its Port Comfort facility, for which the company has received
permits to release vinyl chloride as well as other known
carcinogens, including ethylene dichloride. Rick Abraham of
Texans United believes that environmentalists may still be able
to protect the community from some of the environmental and
health hazards, however. He notes that the process of preparing
environmental impact statements allows for "significant
public input and revisions" that can "lead to the plant
being built differently." But the environmental impact
statement requirement has not prevented Formosa from continuing
construction at the new plant. On April 10, the Texas Water
Commission ruled unanimously to authorize the construction of a
wastewater discharge facility. Formosa spokesman Jim Shepard says
that 186 people from Point Comfort and the surrounding area
showed up at the hearing to support continued construction and
that "the only people who opposed it were an attorney and
Mrs. Wilson." "I got creamed by the dollar bill,"
Wilson laughs, explaining that those supporters are anxious to
bring new jobs to the area. On a more serious note, she
criticizes the Commission for failing to look beyond the prospect
of 1,200 new jobs in making its decision. "The whole issue
was economics. The environmental issue did not come up," she
says. Roger Meacham of the EPA's Region Six Office says that
Formosa is continuing construction "at its own risk"
since it "is not a sure thing at this point" that the
company will receive the wastewater discharge permit. Meacham
says that the EPA has no authority to prohibit the corporation
from building. Abraham, however, contends that it is "wrong
and illegal" for construction to continue while the impact
statement is being prepared. Texans United and CCRW are planning
to take legal action against Formosa in federal court to halt
construction. Wilson believes that publicity outside of Point
Comfort has been her strongest weapon in drawing support and
getting the EPA to act. The Houston Post, in fact, reported that
Formosa officials believed that the EPA chose to hand down the
$8.3 million fine only in the wake of a television report on
Wilson which aired in April 1990 on the program 48 Hours. Wilson
says that she has learned that huge corporations like Formosa are
concerned with little besides their bottom line. "When you
take money from them," she says, "they stop and listen
to you."
Oct. 14, 2005 Houston
Chronicle 書評
AN UNREASONABLE
WOMAN: A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters and the
Fight for Seadrift, Texas.
（「道理をわきまえない女」）
By Diane Wilson.
Chelsea Green, 391 pp. $27.50.
There are forgettable memoirs, and there are memorable memoirs.
Diane Wilson had never thought of writing professionally ? not
even close ? before telling her story of transformation from
shrimp-boat captain, wife and mother of five to daring
environmental activist hoping to save the bays along the Texas
Gulf Coast.
Well, Wilson's first attempt at professional writing is certainly
memorable. Whether it will please or repel any given reader,
though, is difficult to determine.
An Unreasonable Woman is an interesting book, an important book.
But it is not an easy book to become immersed in, or to finish.
Wilson decided to write pretty much as she (apparently) talks.
That means the book is filled with bad grammar, Gulf Coast slang,
run-on sentences, shrimp-boat jargon, not to mention nicknames of
relatives, friends, professional acquaintances and enemies who in
some cases are never fully identified. Here's a specimen of her
style: Referring to her love for the nearby bay, she writes,
"The truth was I was happiest on the bay and loved that it
never changed, even when I left. The water had the same smell and
the same sounds that I remembered, and it no more changed than
the blood in my veins changed. I didn't need to be told that I
had went off and danced wildly, then come back tired and weary
and lay down hard at her feet. She was the one thing that didn't
quit when everything else fled like a fire was driving
them."
Born in 1948 and having spent her entire life around Seadrift in
Calhoun County, Wilson admits she had no idea she inhabited one
of the most polluted areas of the United States until, at age 40,
she read a newspaper clipping handed to her by a fellow shrimper.
Wilson knew shrimp catches had been poor but had not connected
the declining business to water pollution caused by industrial
chemical plants.
Inexplicably, even to herself, Wilson made a telephone call to a
Houston environmental lawyer named James Blackburn, known to her
only by reputation because of work he had done for shrimp-boat
operators. Blackburn suggested Wilson call a town meeting to
discuss the pollution reported to the federal government and
disseminated in a new report called the Toxic Release Inventory.
A nervous wreck
Wilson had never called a meeting, never spoken at a meeting. She
was a nervous wreck. She had no idea that modest meeting in tiny
Seadrift would lead to regulatory and legal battles pitting her
on one side (aided most of the time by nobody other than
Blackburn, a few environmental activists scattered around Texas,
her work colleague Donna Sue Williams and the occasional
journalist) against some of the biggest corporations in the
world.
The focus of Wilson's crusade became Formosa Plastics, an overseas-owned corporation
petitioning to build a new industrial chemical plant on the
coast. Politicians and economic development officials wanted the
plant built, Wilson charges, because of revenue streams and new
job opportunities. The hell with the additional pollution that
Formosa Plastics would cause.
Wilson had never read or even heard of environmental-impact
statements and other such complicated government documents. But
despite her lack of awareness and formal education, she learned
how to find, read and interpret scientific data. She learned how
to negotiate with government bureaucrats and corporate officers.
Her notoriety made her lots of enemies but also attracted
whistleblowers who leaked internal documents to her.
Despite a modicum of success in reducing pollution, Wilson felt
that zero discharge into the water was the only satisfactory
solution. To achieve her goal, Wilson decided that civil
disobedience and other extreme measures would become part of her
strategy. So she trespassed onto corporate land, organized picket
lines, endured self-induced hunger strikes. Authorities arrested
her, jailed her. Her marriage disintegrated. But she would not,
could not, stop.
The climax of the memoir comes when Wilson decides to sink her
shrimp boat on the illegal discharge pipe of Formosa Plastics. It
turns out that sinking a shrimp boat at a specific place in a big
body of water is difficult, especially when the Coast Guard is
working alongside powerful corporations to halt such an action.
How the sinking tactic turned out will be one of many joys of
discovery for readers who soldier on to the book's final page.