Hunger Strike Targets Dow Chemical
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Hunger Strike Targets Dow Chemical
Date:
Mon, 22 Jul 2002 06:15:22 -0400
From:
Stephen Tvedten <steve@getipm.com>
Organization: Get Set Inc. (www.getipm.com)
To: Paul Helliker <phelliker@cdpr.ca.gov>
Director, State of California, Department of Pesticide
Regulation
cc: Christine Whitman whitman.christine@epa.gov
Hunger Strike Targets Dow ChemicalSEADRIFT, Texas, July 19, 2002 (ENS) - Diane Wilson is sitting in the back of her pickup truck outside a chemical plant, wearing a cowboy hat and refusing to eat to draw attention to pollution in San Antonio Bay.
Wilson is a fourth generation fisherwoman who has been fighting Union Carbide for decades. She made her living by shrimp fishing until she started seeing dead dolphins and pelicans. When the shrimp came up dead, she decided to act.
The Union Carbide plant, now owned by Dow, operates alongside sensitive wetlands and a bay system that provides a livelihood to fishing community of Seadrift. The plant dumps five to 10 million gallons of wastewater each day into a barge canal that opens into San Antonio Bay.
Union Carbide, now owned by Dow, is the company responsible for the 1984 disaster in Bhopal, India, where the company's pesticide manufacturing plant released a toxic gas cloud over the city. The world's worst industrial disaster killed 2,500 people and injured hundreds of thousands more.
Activists in India are also conducting a hunger strike against Dow, demanding that Dow not escape responsibility for justice for the victims and to ensure that criminal actions against Union Carbide executives be prosecuted.
"Three Bhopal activists, including two women injured in the 1984 disaster, have been on a hunger strike since June 28, 2002," says the Pesticide Action Network. "This effort has a special urgency because the Indian government has sent two major signals that Union Carbide/Dow may be released from responsibility."
Diane Wilson learned that her Texas county has the highest rate of toxic disposal in the country, and her home town hosts three chemical plants. She started studying chemistry and looking into how the industry was affecting her environment.
Wilson began with protests and a hunger strike in the mid-1990s against Formosa Plastics, forcing them to reconsider their discharges of toxic chemicals into the waters where she fished. She was often alone and criticized for her work, but says she knew that someone had to take a stand and stop the pollution.
Today, she is still fighting the chemical discharges, but she is no longer alone. Inspired by Wilson's work, housewives and other members of her community support her. Wilson urges other ordinary women to get involved.
"If a fisherwoman with a high school education that doesn't even like chemistry can get compliance from a petrochemical plant, then anyone can," Wilson said.
Well Mr. Helliker, What will it take for you to allow the use of safe and far more effective unregistered alternatives to actually control pest problems?
Respectfully, Stephen L. Tvedten
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