"I nodded my head and watched the lights smear like colored water on the ceiling. 
'Once,' I said, 'when it was Christmastime and I first got my driver's license, I drove around a big town for the first time and I ran every traffic light, thinking it was Christmas lights.'
'I can appreciate that,' he said. 'I come from a small town too. A traffic light wasn't in my vocabulary neither.' Now, he said, sometimes he thought it all was just a bad dream. That somehow he would wake up and it would be nothing but a bad dream. Be back in his own bed in a small town. 'Now, I ain't nothing but sick all the time. I'm almost finished. I know it. I can't perform my craft anymore. I can't weld. I can't hold my arm up to burn a rod anymore.'
[...]
'One leak we had out there was this vessel. I couldn't believe it. They called me out. It was the middle of the night. I couldn't believe it. I just live across the street, so I got all the calls out. I am making eighty, ninety, a hundred hours a week. Year after year. So when I go in, I seen all the lights were flashing. I seen this cloud going north. That vessel had a real nice rust hole. Well, not rust. It was eat out from the chemical. But they didn't want to shut it down. And all I had was a slicker and a face shield to go get into that. I didn't have any kind of face mask, you know, any kind of breathing or fresh air or anything. I got soaked in it. It was EDC [ethylene dichloride]...'
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Chelsea Green PublishingAn Unreasonable Woman
Wilson is a fourth-generation shrimp-boat captain from Seadrift, Texas, who took on big industrial polluters and won. Her book, An Unreasonable Woman, to be published on Labor Day, is the tale of her journey from "nobody particular" to a leading player in the fight to clean up industry and hold it accountable for the devastation it causes.
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Black smoke billows into the sky after an explosion and fire at the Formosa Plastics plant at Point Comfort on Thursday [06.10.05]. Diane Wilson, an activist and local shrimper who has protested against the company - a campaign that culminated in August 2002, when she chained herself to one of the plant's towers - said a serious incident was bound to happen.
Cappiello and Hanson/HoustonChronicle/CommonDreams
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Interview with Wilson at Pressureworks
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Wilson video at Texas Legacy (realplayer)
transcript
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Wilson interview at Satya
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Wilson interview at DemocracyNow! 11.10.05
