This case study builds on and extends material donated by Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation shrimp fisher and environmental activist living in Calhoun County, Texas.
Over the last three decades, Wilson has documented the activities of petrochemical companies in the region (including Alcoa, Union Carbide, Formosa Plastics, among others), collecting oral histories with workers and whistleblowers, news clippings, leaked company audits, legal documents. Wilson's has also published several books and participated in feature documentary films about her activism.
The collections below make this material available to the broader public, featuring commentary by Diane Wilson, as well as a growing set of annotations by environmental justice researchers.
Click for a publicly accessible bibliography of news and research articles about environmental advocacy in Calhoun County.
Tim Schütz, Kim Fortun
November 2021
Project
EnviroInjustice: Building a Global Record
Collections
Calhoun County | Formosa Plastics Global Archive
citizens’ suit | data divergence | economic cooperatives | Formosa Plastics | infrastructural injustice | mercury | nurdles | oystering | petrochemical industry | plastic pellets | shrimping | transitional justice | Superfund | Trumped | Union Carbide
1. What is the setting of this case? What are its assets?
Calhoun County is a rural yet highly industrialized county on the Gulf Coast of Texas, 150 miles south of Houston, 240 miles north of the Mexican border. It is the ancestral lands of the Karankawa, Esto’k Gna (Carrizo/Comecrudo), and Coahuiltecan (Native Land 2021)....
Today, somewhat paradoxically, Calhoun County largely leans far right politically, with over 66% voting for President Donald Trump in 2016 (DataUSA 2021). Conservative churches are leading voices in local politics.
Diane Wilson is also an important voice: a mother of five and fourth-generation shrimp boat captain that became an environmental activist following the publication of toxic release inventory data in 1989 (Fortun 2009).
Commercial fishing once sustained many residents of Calhoun County. Today, few people make a living fishing though there are high hopes of revival. In 2017, environmental activists for Calhoun County -- organized as the Calhoun County Waterkeppers-- settled a landmark citizens lawsuit against Formosa, winning $50 million USD to support environmental monitoring, research and education programs, and to rebuild the local fishing community. Plaintiffs brought literally buckets of evidence forward, supporting allegations of rampant and illegal discharge of plastic pellets and other pollutants into Lavaca Bay and nearby waterways from a Formosa plant in Point Comfort, directly on Lavaca Bay. The judge described Formosa as a “serial offender.”
The case was led by Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, which describes the outcome as the largest settlement of a Clean Water Act suit filed by private individuals. The success is already shadowed, however, by plans to build a new port facility to support the export of shale gas from Calhoun County. The port project works against decarbonization and will exacerbate climate change. It also will involve deep dredging of Lavaca Bay, roiling mercury-laced sediment in one of the nation’s largest and most toxic Superfund sites, created by the operations of a now-closed Alcoa aluminum refinery, which released estimated 1.2 million pounds of mercury into the Bay in the late 1960s and 1970s. This is a combo disaster at its worst, when earlier successes in environmental protection are undermined by failed environmental protection today.
ARCHIVE LINKS
Collection: Calhoun County Backstories
Collection: Launching Environmental Activism
Calhoun County today is hazardous in multiple, intersecting ways. There are 12 facilities designated by the US EPA as RMP facilities because of the potential for off-site releases of toxic chemicals (Right-To-Know Network 2018).
Calhoun County is also climate vulnerable, atmospheric and economic. As the Gulf of Mexico heats, hurricanes are growing more intense, Calhoun County is also poised to become a new export hub from
Amidst this tangle of hazards, Formosa still dominates the landscape.
ARCHIVE LINKS
Collection: Union Carbide
Collection: Fighting Alcoa
Collection: Formosa Plastics
Collection: Risk Management Plans
Collection: Cumulative Hazards
EXTERNAL LINKS
Film: Seadrift
3. What intersecting factors -- social, cultural, political, technological, ecological -- contribute to environmental health vulnerability and injustice in this setting?
Many factors work against environmental protection and justice in Calhoun County. Formal education levels are low, as is access to health care. Calhoun County has a notably low score for “youth opportunity”.
EXTERNAL LINKS
4. Who are stakeholders, what are their characteristics, and what are their perceptions of the problems?
ARCHIVE LINKS
Collection: Formosa Plastics Texas Worker Interviews
Collection: Fishing Futures
5. What have different stakeholder groups done (or not done) in response to the problems in this case?
Diane is a fourth generation shrimper and mother of five In 1989, Diane was helping manage one of Calhoun County’s fish houses, where shrimpers brought in their catch. One of the shrimpers - with cancer boils covering his arms -- brought her a newspaper with news that Calhoun county had the worst toal letal topic missions in the United States -- in tonnage of mercury leaked into Diane's bays. The information was newly available through the US Toxic Release Inventory, a database mandated by the Community Right to Know Act, passed in the aftermath of the catastrophic 1984 chemical plant disaster in Bhopal India, which killed thousands immediately and exported nearly half a million people to toxic gas. News that her community was threatened maddening and motivated Diane, launching her incredible career as an environmental activist. Diane has won many awards, books have been written about her, and she has written three fabulous books herself. I recommend them all, and urge you to think about what provokes, supports and sustains the emergence of new environmental activists, particularly those who think of themselves as “nobody in particular,” the title of a hilarious, detail rich graphic story about Dain’s early activism. You can read the book in our archive, noting how our capacity to archive -- in databases like the Toxic Release Inventory, or social science archives like ours -- provide critical support for environmental protection. Environmental politics, in so many ways, is also data politics.
ARCHIVE LINKS
Collection: Launching Environmental Activism
Collection: The Waterkeepers Win
6. How have environmental problems in this setting been reported on by media, environmental groups, companies and government agencies?
ARCHIVE LINKS
Bibliography: Calhoun County Zotero
Collection: Calhoun County Archive
Collection: Launching Environmental Activism
Artifact: Nobody in Particular (Graphic Novel)
Collection: Waterkeepers Win
EXTERNAL LINKS
7. What local actions would reduce environmental vulnerability and injustice in this setting?
ARCHIVE LINKS
Collection: Waterkeepers Win
Collection: Cleaning up over the Long Haul
8. What extra-local actions (at state, national or international levels) would reduce environmental vulnerability and injustice in this setting and similar settings?
ARCHIVE LINKS
Project: Formosa Plastics Global Archive
Collection: Pipeline & Port Proposal
Timeline: Formosa Plastics Select Incidents and Known Harms (by Brenda Vuong)
Timeline: Formosa Plastics’ Development and Investment (by Ying-Feng Tai)
9. What kinds of data and research would be useful in efforts to characterize and address environmental threats in this setting and similar settings?
Expected air pollution from the port project.
What kind of community archive would scaffold fishing community?
ARCHIVE LINKS
Collection: Fishing Futures
10. What intersecting injustices -- data, economic, epistemic, gender, health, infrastructure, intergenerational, media, procedural, racial, reproductive -- contribute to environmental injustice in this setting?
ARCHIVE LINKS
Collection: Fishing Futures
Wilson Diane, Tim Schütz, Shan-Ya Su, Hung-Yang Lin, Chia-Liang Shih, Wen-Ling Tu, Paul Jobin and Kim Fortun. 2021. Calhoun County, Texas, USA 卡爾霍恩縣. Formosa Plastics Global Archive. Disaster STS Research Network.
