2006 Rising Tide Dinner

On Oct. 20th, 2006, the Penobscot Valley chapter held its 4th annual Rising Tide Dinner at the Union Street Brick Church in Bangor. Celebrating the past year’s successes, honorees included Rep. Sean Faircloth, MPA member Jay LeGore, and the Healthcare Justice Campaign. Our keynote speaker was Diane Wilson, a lifelong shrimper and activist who recently helped form Code Pink, a social justice group. Diane urged dinner attendees to be unrelenting in our demands from corporations and political leaders. The dinner was a huge success, in no small part because of the work of MPA members Jay Dresser, Terri Young, and Ashley Zook, who all helped to organize the event. Many thanks as well to the numerous volunteers who helped out that evening.

Check back soon for more photos!

Keynote Speaker

Diane Wilson
Shrimper, Environmentalist, Activist,
Co-founder of Code Pink

“We’re losing ground. This planet is losing ground. So things need to happen and they need to happen quick. Our message should be—loud and clear—there comes a times when the home needs protecting and the line needs drawing and anybody that dares cross it acts at their own peril.”

Fourth-generation shrimper Diane Wilson had no idea how her life would change when she called a meeting in 1989 to discuss how expanding a plastics manufacturing plant might affect the environment in her coastal Texas county. She just wanted honest discussion of things anyone who lived in Calhoun County would care about: the impact of a Formosa Plastics expansion on the health of the people who lived there and on the livelihood of those who fished the bay.

Wilson couldn’t know that her dog would be shot in her yard, she would become a pariah in her own community, and someone would attempt to sink her boat—with her on it. She couldn’t know that she, with just a high-school diploma and a dislike of chemistry, would become conversant in chemical compounds and their health risks, file her own legal briefs, and learn more about corruption of public officials than anyone wants to believe. She couldn’t imagine that what she was starting was a new life path that would fortify her sense of purpose and draw international networks of support. As Wilson writes in her 2005 book, An Unreasonable Woman,“ Risking one’s life can be strangely liberating,”

The expansion got a green light despite Wilson’s campaign. After a lot more work and four hunger strikes, she persuaded Formosa Plastics to sign a zero-discharge agreement—and then neighboring Alcoa to sign one of its own. Visiting India, she came home and went after another neighbor, Dow Chemical, which had bought Union Carbide after its massively lethal, Bhopal chemical spill in 1984. Wilson pressed the company to make fair reparations to Bhopal families.

When Wilson told her story at the 2001 Bioneers Conference of environmental activists and scientists, she challenged listeners to become “unreasonable” in their defense of the Earth. A new group, Unreasonable Women for the Earth, immediately formed, and Wilson says members in eight countries supported her hunger strike against Dow. She co-founded another network of women activists, Code Pink for Peace, in 2002.

In December 2005, Wilson began serving a four-month jail sentence for civil criminal trespass when she chained herself to a Dow Chemical tower in August 2002. The jail term opened a new chapter in her activism, as she advocated for better conditions for other women imprisoned in the Victoria County jail.

The image of Diane Wilson above is from the series of paintings Americans Who Tell The Truth by Maine artist (and MPA member) Robert Shetterly. To see other paintings in this powerful series, please visit the Americans Who Tell The Truth website.

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