Why an Activist From Texas Crossed the World to Confront Asia’s Biggest Petrochemical Company

The Resistance, Part 2: Three Gulf Coast environmentalists confront Formosa Plastics Corp. at its shareholders meeting.

YUNLIN COUNTY, Taiwan—In many ways, at nearly 80 years old, Diane Wilson would have rather stayed home. A retired shrimper with a high school education, she agreed to come here without thinking too much, as usual. That’s how she does things.

That’s why she’d spent all of March camped outside a chemical plant on a hunger strike near her tiny Gulf Coast town in Texas, and why now she was on a dock in Taiwan listening to a gray-haired oysterman speak in Mandarin.

Wilson liked the man, named Lin Chun Lan. She smiled as she discovered how much they had in common. As fisherfolk they shared a reverence for the bounty of the ocean and a stubborn refusal to abandon its pursuit. That’s what drove them both to fight the same multi-billion-dollar company, Formosa Plastics Corp. Both persisted for decades. Both earned the ire of local power structures.

“They know that no one can buy him,” a translator for the oysterman told Wilson and the half-dozen others gathered on the dock in what happened to be one of the hottest weeks in Taiwanese history. “The local politicians hate him.”

Lin added a few more words in Chinese.

“He also hates the politicians,” his translator said.

Wilson laughed. She could relate.

At home, almost 40 years of radical activism left her branded as an extremist, an environmentalist with few friends in a political system devoted to economic growth. But outside the system she counts plenty of allies, especially since she received the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2023 for her landmark lawsuit and $50 million settlement agreement with Formosa Plastics on the Gulf Coast of Texas.

Now she had crossed 13 time zones to confront Formosa’s leadership on its home turf, at its annual shareholder meeting in Taipei, and two of her strongest allies joined her: Sharon Lavigne, 76, a retired special education teacher from Louisiana’s St. James Parish, who also won the Goldman Prize for her fight against Formosa’s plans to build in her community; and Nancy Bui, 72, a former Vietnamese refugee in Texas whose organization is suing Formosa in Taiwanese court over a 2016 disaster in Vietnam.

Wilson didn’t expect to change the minds of Formosa’s board and chairman or to otherwise win concessions on this trip to Taiwan. That wasn’t the point.

Diane Wilson on a bus to Taipei.

Wilson believes it’s important to stay in their face. She traveled all this way to show Formosa that, even at 78, she isn’t going away and, with Bui and Lavigne beside her, isn’t alone.

The Environmental Rights Foundation, a Taiwanese organization, brought the three women here to put pressure on authorities, speak before Formosa shareholders and inspire local leaders in their own exhausting struggles against Asia’s largest petrochemical company.

A Shrimper and an Oysterman

Looking over the remnants of his oyster farm, Lin recounted the difficulties of organizing for 30 years against industrial giants, including Formosa Plastics, which once planned to fill this patch of sea with earth and create new land to build a steel mill.

Very few civic leaders, academics and environmental groups ever supported him, he said. If townspeople spoke out, Formosa or other industrial developers heaped gifts on their friends and family. If that didn’t work, criminal organizations stepped in to intimidate him.

“He was threatened with guns,” Lin’s translator said, describing threats that came from one of those other companies. “He said, ‘If you want to shoot me, just shoot.’”

Lin was never shot. But later construction of industrial shipping infrastructure offshore affected water currents here, Lin said, so the ocean began lapping mud into the clear lagoon where he used to farm. After so many generations, most of the fishermen along this coastline are gone.

Diane Wilson listens to Lin Chun Lan recount stories of oyster farming at Wu Tiao Gang harbor in Yunlin County, Taiwan.

Wilson could relate to that, too. Born in 1948, she remembers watching the timeless way of life in her Texas fishing village dwindle to practically nothing as marine life faded from the water while petrochemical industries moved in with higher-paying jobs. For refusing to bow to the new order, Wilson felt shunned at home.

She asked Lin if he ever went to gather wild oysters from natural reefs like they did in Texas. In his grandmother’s time they did that, he said.

He looked at Wilson, whose frizzy grey hair blew over her face in the wind, and asked if she remembered him. Wilson, 78, suspected that she did. But her memories were jumbled. This was her fourth time in Taiwan, she told him proudly.

This country played a big role in her life.

Four Trips to Taiwan

Her first visit was in 1992, she told Lin. She came by invitation of local environmental groups who read about her fight against Formosa Plastics in Texas and supposed that she had something to t…