(Posted March 29, 2004)

HUNTINGDON, Pa. -- Diane Wilson, founder of the environmental group UnReasonable Women for the Earth, will speak at Juniata College at 7 p.m., Monday, April 5 in the Sill Board Room in the von Liebig Center for Science on the Juniata campus.

The lecture is free and open to the public. The lecture is sponsored by the Baker Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies together with Penn State?s First World Affairs Forum.

Wilson will talk about ?The Intimate Connection Between the Environment and Peace from a Global Perspective. In her lecture, she will describe her activism and detail her travels overseas to protest environmental pollution. She will discuss her trip to Bhopal, India, site of one of history?s most deadly industrial accidents, and trips to Taiwan and Iraq.

Wilson started her working life as a shrimp boat operator on the Texas Gulf Coast. When she monitored an increasing decline in her catch, she became an environmental activist and organized hunger strikes to force industrial plants to significantly decrease their pollution emissions into the Gulf.

In 2002, she created the group UnReasonable Women for the Earth and helped co-found a larger organization called CodePink: Women for Peace, which is actively in opposition to the war in Iraq. She has organized a number of public displays of protest, including a photographic event at Love Field at Point Reyes Station, Calif., where a group of nude women spelled out ?Peace? using their bodies.

Contact April Feagley at feaglea@juniata.edu or (814) 641-3131 for more information.