Also in Chelsea Green Kids

Nobody Particular

One Woman's Fight to Save the Bays

by Molly Bang

Associated Articles

The Power of One

Library Journal
by Wilda Williams

It is not often that a publisher has to worry about scheduling a book tour around an author's jail term, but then Diane Wilson is no ordinary writer. In 2002, the then 52-year-old former shrimp boat captain–turned–environmental/political activist jumped the fence at a Dow Chemical plant in her hometown of Seadrift, TX, climbed a 70' tower, and chained herself there for eight hours to protest Union Carbide's denial of responsibility for the 1984 chemical plant explosion in Bhopal, India, that left thousands dead. (Dow, which now owns Union Carbide, has refused to clean up the site.)

"At the trial, the district attorney said I was a very dangerous woman," says Wilson, who is appealing her four-month jail sentence but expects to lose. "Believe me, I was not like this when I first started my activism." Her memoir, An Unreasonable Woman, traces the remarkable transformation of an ordinary working-class mother of five, who in 1989 read a newspaper article that identified her impoverished Calhoun County as the most polluted in the country.

"There are pivotal points in people's lives, and if they don't move on it, their lives are lacking for it," Wilson tells LJ. In her case, she chose to launch a grass-roots campaign to stop Formosa Plastics and other chemical companies from further dumping their toxic waste into the fragile bays along Texas's Gulf Coast. When town meetings, letter-writing, and lawsuits had little effect, Wilson undertook more drastic acts of civil disobedience, including staging several hunger strikes, until finally in 1994 she won "zero discharge" agreements (meaning no liquid effluent discharge into the environment) from Formosa and Alcoa.

"This is the story of the power of one individual to effect change," remarks Chelsea Green publisher and cofounder Margo Baldwin. With Wilson's book, Baldwin explains, the Vermont-based publisher of books on sustainable living is returning to its original intent of doing "exciting, important titles that would inspire as well as address practical aspects." Baldwin had stepped out of the day-to-day running of the company but returned in late 2002 out of concern that its focus had grown too narrow. "We didn't drop the how-to," says Baldwin, "but we felt we had to publish broader-visioned books that would reach a wider audience."

At the same time, Chelsea Green is making another departure, reissuing Molly Bang's pictorial biography, Nobody Particular: One Woman's Fight To Save the Bays (Sept. ISBN 1-931498-94-6. pap. $10), which Holt published in 2000 as a children's picture book. Bang's striking black-and-white story panels set against a backdrop of color illustrations, Baldwin thought, hadn't found its right audience the first time. She decided it would be interesting to promote the book as a young adult graphic novel to accompany Wilson's memoir.

This past June, Wilson attended BookExpo America in New York City, but further book promotion plans depend upon the outcome of her appeal and the ruling's timing. Chelsea Green is working on a contingency plan, including videotaping Wilson for a virtual tour and having her do some podcasting from jail. "If worst comes to worst," says Baldwin, "we may sell books outside the jailhouse to help publicize her plight and raise money for her legal defense fund. I'm sure we can find a lot of 'unreasonable women' to participate!"