Environmental activist Diane Wilson on Rag Radio
Video by Jeff Zavala, Interview by Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / July 6, 2011
Environmental activist Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation shrimper from Seadrift, Texas, and the author of Diary of an Eco-Activist: An Unreasonable Woman Breaks the Law for Mother Earth, was Thorne Dreyer’s guest on Rag Radio on June 24, 2011. It was a lively, informative, and entertaining affair and Jeff Zavala of ZGraphix and Austin Indymdia captured it on videotape and posted it on blip.tv. (Watch it above.)
Diane Wilson — a mother of five — has earned the wrath of industrial polluters everywhere. She has been arrested 50 times, has held numerous hunger strikes, and has participated in disruptions of U.S. Senate hearings and corporate shareholder gatherings in Houston, Taipei, and London. She was Mother Jones magazine’s “Hell-Raiser of the Month,” and was one of Grist’s “13 Badass Greens.” She was a founder of CodePink, the Texas Jail Project, and Injured Workers United. She is the author of several critically-acclaimed books, and was featured in the award-winning PBS documentary, Texas Gold, and received a Dobie Paisano Writing Fellowship for 2010.
Jeff Zavala is a native Austin documentarian and activist whose work covers immigrant rights, native peoples’ rights, anti-war protests, and the Palestinian liberation struggle. He created ZGraphix Productions and is also the founder of the Austin Activist Archives, a virtual collective dedicated to broadcasting citizen journalism, direct action, civil disobedience, social activism, community organizing, lectures, and music in and around Austin, Texas. Jeff also works as a volunteer for Austin Indymedia, the Workers Defense Project, and the Austin Immigrant Rights Coalition.
Rag Radio – hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer — is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the web. The show, which has been aired since September 2009, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history. It is produced in association with The Rag Blog and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation that publishes The Rag Blog. After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive. Tracey Schulz is co-producer of Rag Radio, and the show’s engineer.
Host Dreyer is an Austin writer, editor, broadcaster, and activist who for years ran a prominent Houston public relations firm. An influential underground journalist in the Sixties, Dreyer was the original editor of The Rag, Austin’s legendary underground newspaper, was a founding editor of Space City! in Houston, and was an editor at Liberation News Service (LNS) in New York. Dreyer was also general manager of KPFT-FM, the Pacifica radio station in Houston.
Thorne Dreyer’s guest this Friday on Rag Radio will be University of Texas journalism professor, widely-published author, and Austin-based political activist and leading radical thinker Robert Jensen. Jensen, who is also a board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austi,n will discuss his recent essay, “The Anguish in the American Dream,” posted on The Rag Blog, as well as the current ecological crisis and the key role he believes it must play in our political thinking. Jeff Zavala will also be taping this show, and we will post the video on The Rag Blog next week.
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