Dana Durnford’s Post-Fukushima Odyssey: Documenting Ecocide on Canada’s
West Coast
By Robert Snefjella
21 April, 2015
Countercurrents.org
Dana Durnford’s odyssey, in 2014 and 2015, has been to
document what has happened and is happening since Fukushima to wild life,
plant and animal, in the waters and tidal zone and pools on the West Coast
of Canada. His boat is a little Zodiac water craft, almost impossible to
sink, but no comfort inn. He has sailed it largely alone, with his
intrepid old dog Zoey, for months and for many hundreds of kilometers
along the shores of British Columbia and its islands and out to the Queen
Charlotte Islands.
Resourceful and brave and determined is Dana, as he struggles and endures
many troubles and hardships. For an able bodied person to undertake what
Dana has done would be heroic. Dana is physically handicapped from an
accident and relies on a wheelchair and crutches.
Dana has taken many thousands of photographs, and has been interviewed
weekly many times by Jeff Rense on his radio show at Rense.com. These are
archived at Rense.com
Dana also reports via his website nuclearproctologist.org.
Dana is plain spoken and usually low key, sometimes nearly inaudibly so,
as he brings us news of the Pacific Ocean’s palliative condition. Even
Dana’s angry comments seem muted by his grief and disbelief, as he
describes his voyage and his observations and shares his thoughts. His web
site already has much photographic and other information, and his current
journey will add many thousands more.
Dana’s observations underline that we have reached the end, a dead end, at
least for civilization on its contemporary terminally dysfunctional basis,
and announces a time of grievous troubles for much of life as we have
known it.
From his website:
Fukushima will kill the entire Pacific Ocean
October 9, 2014
Day 18 on the beaches we hit Pine Island off the north east of
Vancouver Island and several other islands in a 75 km 7 hour trip. We
stayed out till dark it took about 80 minutes to ride back with a full
moon behind the heavy rain clouds. We still only found just a small
handful of kelp and algae out of 600 known species. We have to hunt to
find any species to take a picture of. The chances of finding the same
species anywhere else is tiny we still have not seen any sea cucumbers
or sea squirts or sea fans or large snails or rocks full of snails and
limpets etc etc or life in tidal pools. Underwater life is clinging
for the time being but we are not even trying to stop fukushima….
Out of 70 species of sea anemones we have found 5 species collectively
throughout the coast lines but only two species on these islands today
and they are very few and very random.
We see all along Vancouver Island coast line only 5 species of star
fish out of 64 known local species that were everywhere pre Fukushima.
Did you know Fukushima really happened and the Jet Streams are real,
yea go figure. Did you know that three reactors are bleeding and
hemorrhaging into the pacific ocean 24/7 – 365 days a year and that
the media and nuclear crazy apologist use numbers from a single
release from a single reactor and have never included the ongoing
massive plumes pouring into the sea every freaking day and into the
jet stream from three 100% melt downs and melt outs all day every day
unrelenting.
In BC life accumulates [that is, used to, until Fukushima: RS] in
every millimeter of its 26,000 km shore line, after all it was the
nursery of the ocean. The B.C. entire coast line’s biodiversity is
well known because all universities have [been] categorizing and
counting the species around BC coast line for decades, many times
over.
I only wonder … what point of extinction will it take before the world
cares….[?]
Part transcript of March 9th, 2015 Rense radio interview:
Jeff Rense: “Okay, and we’re going to go up this half hour, somewhere
along the wilds of the coast of British Columbia to talk to another
remarkable man who has put his life on the line over and over again to
try to bring the truth about what’s happening to our west coast
whether you be Canadian or American, and that the government will not
tell us…. “
Dana: [describing the coastline of Canada] “… less than a hundred
species, total, throughout the entire coastline, out of …”
Jeff: “Out of 6500 that ought to be there.”
Dana: “The visible ones and another 5500 or so of invertebrates….
….the divers a couple of days ago found starfish legs and there was
two of them [divers] and they were horrified, because, and rightly so,
but I mean the whole sea floor was covered in, in ah, star fish legs,
a lot of leather starfish, in particular, and just the legs, didn’t
find the bodies, just the legs everywhere, and they’re pretty
convinced that it’s radiation ….
.... no snails to be found anywhere whatsoever, I couldn’t even find
one….
…. normally you would find millions and millions and millions [of
snails] on each beech and on the rocks and all the mussels were
missing and the algae [is missing and] a lot of them look’s like
they’re petrified, but they all look really, really bad, they look
really unhealthy, and once again the rocks are bare everywhere else.
…. folks don’t understand, in that entire day of hunting at the low
tide zone I could put everything I found in the back of a pickup
truck, and that, you should be able to do that on any beach, let alone
the entire, you know mile after mile after mile, ah we’re coming to an
anniversary of the fourth year, I guess you could call it that.
…. and there was around 50 eagles, that’s the most eagles I’ve seen at
any given time since August … to see 50 eagles was really impressive.
That was a spectacular event. I stopped and got pictures of it. And it
looked like they were feeding and this is something we haven’t seen
along the entire coastline. We should see that every mile. And I
covered, a few weeks back, I covered over 700 nautical miles and never
seen a single flock and there should have been 700 flocks or more if
not five times that, because that’s how this coastline used to be,
always, no matter where you went, so all of that is missing, there’s
just a handful of any species out of 160 odd migratory and 148
residential, there’s only a handful throughout the entire coastline
and you’re only finding them in tiny groups so we’re in a lot of
trouble….
[Dana’s effort is …]…. so stressful at night time, just trying to come
to a stop and have a meal and get some sleep and not drag anchor all
night wrong, and have the waves pound you all day and all night,
relentless, but … my brain will not let me stop it until we complete
it, because it has to get done and nobody else is going to do it. And
if we don’t get the job done [recording the situation on the British
Columbia coastline] we’ll regret that for ever.
…. but they [Canadian Coast Guard] came all the way into the beach
just to yell out and ask me what I was up to. So I told him …. I said
I’m checking for damage from the radiation fallout from Japan and he
said you finding any? I said “Everything is missing!” I said “Are you
blind?!” I named out the species to him and I think I scared the
daylights out of him cause they went away but … I was pretty angry…. I
was heartbroken, I was on this beach after beach after beach and this
little group of islands this morning, it’s blowing really hard, and
I’m got up tight to an island, and I went to the island and got up on
the beach cause you couldn’t do anything else, and it’s stunning that
I couldn’t find anything in the microscopic world or the small world
….”
From March 16th, 2015 interview on Rense radio.
Jeff: “…. Mr. Dana Durnford is there, our special guest, who god knows
where he is, where are you?”
Dana: “Hi Jeff, yes, I’m back in Queen Charlotte City.
Been a rough ride. Today was a very rough one, so both of the boat
motors went down on me today, in rough water….
…. an interesting thing is yesterday I went out at high tide and that
high tide strip is really visible. The ocean comes right up to the
rain forest here on the coastline and so it’s only like a foot, two
foot, at the really highest tide, with a full moon, there will be like
a 2 foot gap there. Now yesterday there was probably a four foot gap
there and you still couldn’t see any kind of life whatsoever at that
high tide line, and that ought to be the best part of it. That’s very
telling, because that should be full of the fauna, the flora, the sea
anemones and all kinds of little critters that live in that particular
zone. That’s a very unique strip along British Columbia that is
actually missing. And that was the big thing about getting out here to
see, to really say, okay, look, it’s actually missing here too. Cause
people won’t believe it until you actually show it to them. You
actually basically have to go look and get pictures of it and actually
show the people before they’ll ultimately believe you, I know that in
my soul, and so that’s why I do the things I do because I know that if
we don’t get that data you can’t have a lucid conversation with
anybody, but if you got the data they ain’t got no wiggle room, and
they’re gonna have to pay attention and they got no way of just
disregarding what you say.”
From February 23rd, 2015 interview on Rense radio:
Dana: “….it’s just impossible to imagine that a couple of years ago
you could break your neck trying to go ashore at the low tide line and
anywhere in British Columbia, this is what I specialize in, these low
tide zones, and now you can go ashore anywhere in British Columbia,
there’s nothing to worry about, ….[whereas previously, due to all the
kelp and algae] you would slip and slide, dangerous, extremely
dangerous, very slippery, unimaginable, nobody could make it up the
high tide line, at low tide, without really hurting their elbows, or
knees, or twisting an ankle, or really being an acrobat, and now
anybody can walk ashore. It’s inconceivable! It’s just devastating to
the entire eco-system. It’s the nursery of the ocean. It’s all
missing!: The very nursery of the ocean itself. And the biggest carbon
sequesterer of the ocean is the phytoplankton. And that’s missing. And
that was also the biggest oxygen producer obviously. And the basis of
the food chain. But it was also the biggest carbon sequesterer on the
planet. And so to blame everything on carbon, but there’s nothing
there to sequester, like it’s normally been doing throughout whoever
knows how long this process has been going on. And so that is all
missing. And all I’m trying to, when I say things like they can’t hide
it much longer, I truly mean they can’t hide it much longer. I can’t
see how they can. They can lie about it all they want for a short
period of time, but it’s going to be impossible to ignore a dead
ocean…Like I can’t ignore what I’m seeing out there. It’s enough to
make you cry. I kid you not.
This is being completed on April 16th, 2015. Over the last couple of
weeks, which is far beyond late - after the most despicable dishonesty
about, and censorship of, information about Fukushima, a bit more of
the disturbing light of reality regarding Fukushima is escaping into
view via more or less ‘official’ Japanese spokesmen. The problems at
Fukushima are declared “insurmountable”, the technology to fix the
situation is declared not to exist. And as Jeff Rense has pointed out,
talk of “decommissioning” the Fukushima reactors is propaganda
nonsense. Decommissioning is the daunting challenge which can be
attempted pertaining to, typically, aged reactors that exist in
something of their original form: Much of the plutonium etc of
Fukushima has evacuated the scene of the crime, to join the global
environment, and extremely radioactive cauldrons of unknown location,
and quantity, and makeup, remains. (1)
The official response, globally, has been to tell lies and to censor.
The massive damage to life within and adjoining the Pacific Ocean – on the
West Coast of North America, an ecocide - has been demoted to an
egregiously distorted footnote. Fukushima is an extreme assault on the
blueprint for life of much of the planet.
This is screaming proof of the pathology, and the terminal dysfunction, of
our current culture, and especially of our basic institutions of
government, and mass communications. We are being fatally misled.
Now, very, very late, Fukushima remains a salvage-what-we-can-operation of
the most extreme urgency, and requires our utmost honest and intelligent
fullness of attention and discourse. WAKE UP!
Note: (1) For research connections and pertinent comments on plutonium in
the Pacific see http://majiasblog.blogspot.ca/
For a recent (April 11th, 2015 missive from Dana Durnford see
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9RNBCp0QKs
Robert Snefjella is a retired organic farmer living in Ontario, Canada. He
can be reached at robts@xplornet.com
West Coast
By Robert Snefjella
21 April, 2015
Countercurrents.org
Dana Durnford’s odyssey, in 2014 and 2015, has been to
document what has happened and is happening since Fukushima to wild life,
plant and animal, in the waters and tidal zone and pools on the West Coast
of Canada. His boat is a little Zodiac water craft, almost impossible to
sink, but no comfort inn. He has sailed it largely alone, with his
intrepid old dog Zoey, for months and for many hundreds of kilometers
along the shores of British Columbia and its islands and out to the Queen
Charlotte Islands.
Resourceful and brave and determined is Dana, as he struggles and endures
many troubles and hardships. For an able bodied person to undertake what
Dana has done would be heroic. Dana is physically handicapped from an
accident and relies on a wheelchair and crutches.
Dana has taken many thousands of photographs, and has been interviewed
weekly many times by Jeff Rense on his radio show at Rense.com. These are
archived at Rense.com
Dana also reports via his website nuclearproctologist.org.
Dana is plain spoken and usually low key, sometimes nearly inaudibly so,
as he brings us news of the Pacific Ocean’s palliative condition. Even
Dana’s angry comments seem muted by his grief and disbelief, as he
describes his voyage and his observations and shares his thoughts. His web
site already has much photographic and other information, and his current
journey will add many thousands more.
Dana’s observations underline that we have reached the end, a dead end, at
least for civilization on its contemporary terminally dysfunctional basis,
and announces a time of grievous troubles for much of life as we have
known it.
From his website:
Fukushima will kill the entire Pacific Ocean
October 9, 2014
Day 18 on the beaches we hit Pine Island off the north east of
Vancouver Island and several other islands in a 75 km 7 hour trip. We
stayed out till dark it took about 80 minutes to ride back with a full
moon behind the heavy rain clouds. We still only found just a small
handful of kelp and algae out of 600 known species. We have to hunt to
find any species to take a picture of. The chances of finding the same
species anywhere else is tiny we still have not seen any sea cucumbers
or sea squirts or sea fans or large snails or rocks full of snails and
limpets etc etc or life in tidal pools. Underwater life is clinging
for the time being but we are not even trying to stop fukushima….
Out of 70 species of sea anemones we have found 5 species collectively
throughout the coast lines but only two species on these islands today
and they are very few and very random.
We see all along Vancouver Island coast line only 5 species of star
fish out of 64 known local species that were everywhere pre Fukushima.
Did you know Fukushima really happened and the Jet Streams are real,
yea go figure. Did you know that three reactors are bleeding and
hemorrhaging into the pacific ocean 24/7 – 365 days a year and that
the media and nuclear crazy apologist use numbers from a single
release from a single reactor and have never included the ongoing
massive plumes pouring into the sea every freaking day and into the
jet stream from three 100% melt downs and melt outs all day every day
unrelenting.
In BC life accumulates [that is, used to, until Fukushima: RS] in
every millimeter of its 26,000 km shore line, after all it was the
nursery of the ocean. The B.C. entire coast line’s biodiversity is
well known because all universities have [been] categorizing and
counting the species around BC coast line for decades, many times
over.
I only wonder … what point of extinction will it take before the world
cares….[?]
Part transcript of March 9th, 2015 Rense radio interview:
Jeff Rense: “Okay, and we’re going to go up this half hour, somewhere
along the wilds of the coast of British Columbia to talk to another
remarkable man who has put his life on the line over and over again to
try to bring the truth about what’s happening to our west coast
whether you be Canadian or American, and that the government will not
tell us…. “
Dana: [describing the coastline of Canada] “… less than a hundred
species, total, throughout the entire coastline, out of …”
Jeff: “Out of 6500 that ought to be there.”
Dana: “The visible ones and another 5500 or so of invertebrates….
….the divers a couple of days ago found starfish legs and there was
two of them [divers] and they were horrified, because, and rightly so,
but I mean the whole sea floor was covered in, in ah, star fish legs,
a lot of leather starfish, in particular, and just the legs, didn’t
find the bodies, just the legs everywhere, and they’re pretty
convinced that it’s radiation ….
.... no snails to be found anywhere whatsoever, I couldn’t even find
one….
…. normally you would find millions and millions and millions [of
snails] on each beech and on the rocks and all the mussels were
missing and the algae [is missing and] a lot of them look’s like
they’re petrified, but they all look really, really bad, they look
really unhealthy, and once again the rocks are bare everywhere else.
…. folks don’t understand, in that entire day of hunting at the low
tide zone I could put everything I found in the back of a pickup
truck, and that, you should be able to do that on any beach, let alone
the entire, you know mile after mile after mile, ah we’re coming to an
anniversary of the fourth year, I guess you could call it that.
…. and there was around 50 eagles, that’s the most eagles I’ve seen at
any given time since August … to see 50 eagles was really impressive.
That was a spectacular event. I stopped and got pictures of it. And it
looked like they were feeding and this is something we haven’t seen
along the entire coastline. We should see that every mile. And I
covered, a few weeks back, I covered over 700 nautical miles and never
seen a single flock and there should have been 700 flocks or more if
not five times that, because that’s how this coastline used to be,
always, no matter where you went, so all of that is missing, there’s
just a handful of any species out of 160 odd migratory and 148
residential, there’s only a handful throughout the entire coastline
and you’re only finding them in tiny groups so we’re in a lot of
trouble….
[Dana’s effort is …]…. so stressful at night time, just trying to come
to a stop and have a meal and get some sleep and not drag anchor all
night wrong, and have the waves pound you all day and all night,
relentless, but … my brain will not let me stop it until we complete
it, because it has to get done and nobody else is going to do it. And
if we don’t get the job done [recording the situation on the British
Columbia coastline] we’ll regret that for ever.
…. but they [Canadian Coast Guard] came all the way into the beach
just to yell out and ask me what I was up to. So I told him …. I said
I’m checking for damage from the radiation fallout from Japan and he
said you finding any? I said “Everything is missing!” I said “Are you
blind?!” I named out the species to him and I think I scared the
daylights out of him cause they went away but … I was pretty angry…. I
was heartbroken, I was on this beach after beach after beach and this
little group of islands this morning, it’s blowing really hard, and
I’m got up tight to an island, and I went to the island and got up on
the beach cause you couldn’t do anything else, and it’s stunning that
I couldn’t find anything in the microscopic world or the small world
….”
From March 16th, 2015 interview on Rense radio.
Jeff: “…. Mr. Dana Durnford is there, our special guest, who god knows
where he is, where are you?”
Dana: “Hi Jeff, yes, I’m back in Queen Charlotte City.
Been a rough ride. Today was a very rough one, so both of the boat
motors went down on me today, in rough water….
…. an interesting thing is yesterday I went out at high tide and that
high tide strip is really visible. The ocean comes right up to the
rain forest here on the coastline and so it’s only like a foot, two
foot, at the really highest tide, with a full moon, there will be like
a 2 foot gap there. Now yesterday there was probably a four foot gap
there and you still couldn’t see any kind of life whatsoever at that
high tide line, and that ought to be the best part of it. That’s very
telling, because that should be full of the fauna, the flora, the sea
anemones and all kinds of little critters that live in that particular
zone. That’s a very unique strip along British Columbia that is
actually missing. And that was the big thing about getting out here to
see, to really say, okay, look, it’s actually missing here too. Cause
people won’t believe it until you actually show it to them. You
actually basically have to go look and get pictures of it and actually
show the people before they’ll ultimately believe you, I know that in
my soul, and so that’s why I do the things I do because I know that if
we don’t get that data you can’t have a lucid conversation with
anybody, but if you got the data they ain’t got no wiggle room, and
they’re gonna have to pay attention and they got no way of just
disregarding what you say.”
From February 23rd, 2015 interview on Rense radio:
Dana: “….it’s just impossible to imagine that a couple of years ago
you could break your neck trying to go ashore at the low tide line and
anywhere in British Columbia, this is what I specialize in, these low
tide zones, and now you can go ashore anywhere in British Columbia,
there’s nothing to worry about, ….[whereas previously, due to all the
kelp and algae] you would slip and slide, dangerous, extremely
dangerous, very slippery, unimaginable, nobody could make it up the
high tide line, at low tide, without really hurting their elbows, or
knees, or twisting an ankle, or really being an acrobat, and now
anybody can walk ashore. It’s inconceivable! It’s just devastating to
the entire eco-system. It’s the nursery of the ocean. It’s all
missing!: The very nursery of the ocean itself. And the biggest carbon
sequesterer of the ocean is the phytoplankton. And that’s missing. And
that was also the biggest oxygen producer obviously. And the basis of
the food chain. But it was also the biggest carbon sequesterer on the
planet. And so to blame everything on carbon, but there’s nothing
there to sequester, like it’s normally been doing throughout whoever
knows how long this process has been going on. And so that is all
missing. And all I’m trying to, when I say things like they can’t hide
it much longer, I truly mean they can’t hide it much longer. I can’t
see how they can. They can lie about it all they want for a short
period of time, but it’s going to be impossible to ignore a dead
ocean…Like I can’t ignore what I’m seeing out there. It’s enough to
make you cry. I kid you not.
This is being completed on April 16th, 2015. Over the last couple of
weeks, which is far beyond late - after the most despicable dishonesty
about, and censorship of, information about Fukushima, a bit more of
the disturbing light of reality regarding Fukushima is escaping into
view via more or less ‘official’ Japanese spokesmen. The problems at
Fukushima are declared “insurmountable”, the technology to fix the
situation is declared not to exist. And as Jeff Rense has pointed out,
talk of “decommissioning” the Fukushima reactors is propaganda
nonsense. Decommissioning is the daunting challenge which can be
attempted pertaining to, typically, aged reactors that exist in
something of their original form: Much of the plutonium etc of
Fukushima has evacuated the scene of the crime, to join the global
environment, and extremely radioactive cauldrons of unknown location,
and quantity, and makeup, remains. (1)
The official response, globally, has been to tell lies and to censor.
The massive damage to life within and adjoining the Pacific Ocean – on the
West Coast of North America, an ecocide - has been demoted to an
egregiously distorted footnote. Fukushima is an extreme assault on the
blueprint for life of much of the planet.
This is screaming proof of the pathology, and the terminal dysfunction, of
our current culture, and especially of our basic institutions of
government, and mass communications. We are being fatally misled.
Now, very, very late, Fukushima remains a salvage-what-we-can-operation of
the most extreme urgency, and requires our utmost honest and intelligent
fullness of attention and discourse. WAKE UP!
Note: (1) For research connections and pertinent comments on plutonium in
the Pacific see http://majiasblog.blogspot.ca/
For a recent (April 11th, 2015 missive from Dana Durnford see
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9RNBCp0QKs
Robert Snefjella is a retired organic farmer living in Ontario, Canada. He
can be reached at robts@xplornet.com
