"Central to all of elder Commanda's teachings are the fundamental concepts of equality, as well as respect for Mother Earth, for all life and for people of all racial and cultural backgrounds ... Chief Commanda is convinced that the future of life on the planet depends on our learning to live together in harmony with nature upon the land ..."

– Remarks of Robert Chiarelli, Mayor of Ottawa upon presenting Grandfather Commanda with the Key to the City in 2006.

My beloved friend and mentor for over 20 years, Grandfather William Commanda, is cruising through the environmentally and economically  severe summer of 2010, headed resolutely for his 97th birthday come November. Among his adventures this summer in service to the land: meeting England's Queen Elizabeth again, and asking her support for preservation of sacred land. He first met the Queen in 1953 at her coronation. This time she came to his land, Ottawa, capital city of Canada. The story of their encounter this summer is recorded on the blog kept by his companion, Romola Treblecock.

In 1995-96 I had the honor of being one of the walkers with Grandfather when he served as spiritual guide for the Sunbow Five Walk, a pilgrimage lasting eight months. We took our initial steps at First Encounter Beach on the Eastern seaboard of the Atlantic, as native and non-native peoples of all colors and faiths walked in continual ceremony across the continent to take prayers and messages of sustainability and peace-building across the land to the Pacific. All this I chronicled in the free, online epic saga Odyssey of the 8th Fire.

But Grandfather had a long and illustrious history before that pilgrimage. Arriving with the Morning Star in 1913 on the eve of the First World War, he was given his first name by his mother, who called him Ojigkwanong after the star that signifies illumination from darkness. He was born into the Squirrel clan, and like the Squirrel, was destined to walk the hills and valleys, the ups and downs of his life, head first, never going backward. He is the Keeper of the sacred Seven Fires Prophecy Wampum Belt in the time that the teachings are unfolding with the promise of an 8th Fire if the land is respected and honored.

Formerly a builder of birch bark canoes and a wilderness guide, he has been widely acknowledged and honored for his “courage to care” by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples, and is the recipient of both the Wolf and the Harmony Awards for his efforts to create a “Circle of All Nations.” This is the most special of his activities, an annual spiritual gathering that he hosts at his home on the shore of Lake Bitobi in Maniwaki, about 100 kilometers north of Ottawa. The gathering is tradition that has been free and open to all for over 40 years. Almost a thousand people participate every year coming from Canada and the USA, as well as from such distant locations as Japan, Australia, Switzerland, Holland, and France. The dates for this summer are August 6-8, 2010.

Now, above all at this stage of his long life, Grandfather Commanda is resolved to realize Asinakba, his vision to establish a global healing center at Victoria Island. The Island is a jewel of nature, strategically located in the middle of the river that runs through downtown Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, under the shadow of Parliament Hill, where the government of Canada meets.  For countless centuries, Victoria Island was a traditional spiritual meeting ground for the Algonquin peoples.

For the sake of all the land and all the people, Grandfather envisions returning the island to its spiritual purpose by establishing an International Peace Center at the Sacred Site of Asinabka -Chaudière Falls. The center would host programs and processes for individual, group, and planetary healing, development and peace. Toward this end, heading on toward his 97th birthday, he perseveres -- a venerable Keeper of the Land.

“I am convinced that sustainability is the defining question of the 21st Century,” John Ikerd said one icy afternoon in the depth of February, weeks before the Gulf of Mexico exploded into an infernal industrial mess of oil, gas, and chemical dispersant.

Ikerd, a senior statesman among American agrarians, was addressing a conference hosted by the Nebraska Sustainable Agriculture Society in Lincoln. He earned a standing ovation for his definitive, imperative, and impassioned remarks.

Ikerd painted a convincing word picture of how sustainable food production systems can and should be employed to restore health to our bodies and minds, to restore vitality to the land, and to restore long-term stability to our economy. This healing potential, he said as he sounded a conference keynote, is a rural advantage. America would do well to take note.

The very day Ikerd spoke, Bob Herbert wrote an op-ed column titled “Time is Running Out” for The New York Times. “We’ve now lost 8.4 million jobs in this recession, and a vast majority of them are gone for good,” Herbert reported. “The politicians are clambering aboard the jobs bandwagon, belatedly, but very few are telling the truth about the structural employment problems in the U.S. and the extremely heavy lift that is necessary to halt our declining living standards and get us back to an economy that is self-sustaining.”

Noting that our economy has been thrown desperately out of whack by frantic, debt-driven consumption, speculative bubbles, and exotic financial instruments, Herbert reported that living standards are sinking swiftly in the USA, and that there is no coherent long-term vision or plan for reversing that ominous trend.

Almost as if he picked up on the same thought train as the Times columnist, but basing his response on a lifetime of work advocating for clean, truly economic agriculture, Ikerd in his speech said that the issue which has potential to bring this all into focus is public health – specifically the growing epidemics of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, arthritis, allergies and asthma. All these illnesses are related to diet, and our diet is directly related to the way we cultivate the land and raise our animals. It’s all linked.

Now gluttonously congested with agrichemicals, processing and genetic-mechanical initiatives, that link has led to some staggeringly expensive consequences. Health care spending devoured 17 percent of the entire U.S. economy last year according to the Federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. Just a few years back it was only 5 percent, 6 percent, and then 7 percent.  But over the same time period that our diets and our land have been dosed with chemicals, hormones, processing and GMOs, our health costs have ballooned to the present onerous 17 percent. Soon, according to the projections of the Federal Centers, health care will be devouring 20 percent, and then 22 percent of our annual economy. That’s money we could be spending on lots of other things we need.

“For the last 50 years,” Ikerd said, “our focus has been on producing a lot of cheap stuff – with chemicals, herbicides and GMOs. But the decline in human health has paralleled this.” Putting the paradox into a sound bite, he said, “Our country is now both overfed and undernourished.”

One day before Ikerd spoke and Herbert wrote his column for the Times, Congressman Jeff Fortenberry (R), a member of the House Agriculture Committee, told the Nebraska conference that consumers who buy directly from food producers keep 90 percent of food income in the agricultural sector, supporting their neighbors who are local, sustainable growers. Fortenberry also made the connection between clean, healthy food and the kind of good health that could dramatically shrink health-care costs.

John Ikerd really drove the point home with his facts and his rhetoric. The tipping point will come, he said, when we realize that the economic and environmental health of the nation depends upon, and is directly related to the physical and mental health of the people, and that that is related to the health of the soil and the way we cultivate the land.

As with other American agrarians, Ikerd sees the potential of clean sustainable agriculture to be the vision and the plan that leads us out of recession and pollution and into the future with clean food, healthy bodies and minds, a vibrant environment, and a stable economy built on something real and enduring.

“The tide is changing,” he said at the end of his talk. “It takes healthy people to maintain healthy soil and to bring healthy food from the land. There is a new purpose for people to be out in rural areas now, to repopulate our farmlands and to create healthy soil, and healthy food that will lead to healthy people. We need to rebuild from the soil up, and we can do it. Where are we going to find the jobs of the future? They are on the land. There’s a whole new concept of society emerging that is based on local, clean healthy food. That’s the rural advantage.”

N.B. -  John Ikerd published a new book online in April: A Revolution of the Middle