Review: An Unreasonable Woman | by GlennM
An Unreasonable Woman is Diane Wilson's autobiography about her fight to protect the Texas shrimp bays from hazardous pollution from the Formosa company. As a relative newbie to Texas (I'll have been here 10 years this summer), I wasn't aware of the environmental struggles that happened in the mid-80s.
Spoiler: the good guys win. But at the very end. It felt like a mystery novel where things keep looking bleaker for the heroine as you keep turning the pages. There's no way this is going to be resolved....
It's an enjoying read, by someone speaking in the simple language of shrimpers. I won't go into a lot of details to spoil it any more. But it certainly puts into black & white the struggle between jobs and ecology. Along the way, it mentions politicians elected by environmentalists (Gov Richards) who seem to knuckle under to "bizness" as soon as they're in office. It's heart-wrenching to read the stories of folks on the inside who break down because they literally have nothing left to lose. It certainly doesn't bring trust for those whose duty it is to protect us. As one might treat sausage as the plague after reading Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, I'm not very excited about eating seafood right now.
Lessons learned from the book:
* Pollution should be the issue, not chemical companies or big business. Whether it's shrimping or working in a plant, people need jobs. The goal should be to have the jobs be sustainable.
* Some companies seem to be terribly short-sighted. Sooner or later, don't you think the medical/legal costs will dwarf the costs of pollution controls?
* We could use even stronger checks-and-balances when protecting the environment. Forcing government officials to eat food from the lands they're regulating? Things seem to progress when it gets personal. When it's your child's autism or your cancer, things start happening. This is much too late.
* Never underestimate the power of one pissed-off mother.
I didn't come away with a long-term roadmap for how to protect the environment. Trusting that there will always be an unreasonable woman in the right place seems a little fragile. But it got me to order other books on sustainable development [1]. As an inspirational book, I give it a thumbs-up.
[1] http://www.bioneers.org/