An Unreasonable Woman: A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters, and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas

Seadrift, Diane Wilson's lifelong home, is a down-and-out Gulf Coast fishing town where her granddaddy's and daddy's way of life is fading, choked by deadly chemicals in the air, land, and water. Fiercely independent in a male-dominated culture, Wilson works her own shrimp boat and operates her brother's shrimp house. Saltwater runs through her veins, and she feels the chemical wastes from the big Union Carbide and Alcoa plants killing the shrimp, the dolphins, her neighbors, and the sea itself as if they were poisoning her. Wilson wages war on Formosa Plastics, a Taiwanese chemical giant that covers up spills, silences workers, flaunts the EPA, and dumps lethal ethylene dichloride and vinyl chloride into the bays. Ruled by its tyrannical "Chairman," Formosa's Texas cheerleaders include practically every regulator, judge, businessman, and politician from Corpus Christi to Austin. Shunned by friends and despised by neighbors, Wilson fights a lonely battle fired by her outrage at the injustice and corruption that are killing her people and her bays. Though often frightened-her life is threatened, her boat is sabotaged-Wilson is undeterred. An epic tale of heroism and skulduggery, An Unreasonable Woman plays out against a backdrop of outlaw shrimpers and crooked politicians, enviroactivists and informants, grudges and murder, betrayal and redemption.