"Indigenous Xinca villagers burn plastic to dispose of it and stoke cooking fires, unwittingly exposing themselves, their children and environment to deadly pollutants. An ambitious project aims to change that."

"YUNLIN COUNTY, Taiwan—In many ways, at nearly 80 years old, Diane Wilson would have rather stayed home. A retired shrimper with a high school education, she agreed to come here without thinking too much, as usual. That’s how she does things.

That’s why she’d spent all of March camped outside a chemical plant on a hunger strike near her tiny Gulf Coast town in Texas, and why now she was on a dock in Taiwan listening to a gray-haired oysterman speak in Mandarin. 

Wilson liked the man, named Lin Chun Lan. She smiled as she discovered how much they had in common. As fisherfolk they shared a reverence for the bounty of the ocean and a stubborn refusal to abandon its pursuit. That’s what drove them both to fight the same multi-billion-dollar company, Formosa Plastics Corp. Both persisted for decades. Both earned the ire of local power structures. "

Liza Gross reports with photos by Michael Kodas August 16, 2026, supported by the Pulitzer Center. [2]