THE IK FACTOR

As I prepare to vote in the general elections later this year, I’m looking at the environment and carefully measuring every candidate and party for what I call the Ik factor.

I coined the phrase from the late Lewis Thomas who had the knack of writing about all sorts of things in a way I could understand. In one of his best known essays he considered the case of the Iks, an indigenous tribe of Uganda who had two disasters befall them in the 1960s. First they were displaced from their land to create a national park and consequently suffered extreme famine. Second they had a British-American anthropologist come live with and study them for two years, by the end of which he seems to have thoroughly despised them.

He recorded that they lived solitary and unloved lives, snatched food from their weakest members. defecated on each other’s doorsteps, and shouted derision at each other’s misfortunes. Even worse, they treated him as one of the family, meaning they showed him no love at all.

As a result he concluded that not only were they the grabbiest bunch of misery-guts imaginable, they were also proof that at heart humans are naturally inclined to be brutish and anti-social.

When I read that I felt sick because, although my experience said it wasn’t true, it reminded me of something. What? I go with Lewis who suggested that the Iks, in their despair, had gone mad and devolved into singular municipalities, even nation states of one, with no sense of familiness or social bonding to each other or their environment.

Yes, that was it. To illustrate, while such nastiness is still relatively rare between neighbouring whānau, we see Ikness between district and regional authorities every time there’s another spill of raw tiko into our waterways. It’s even worse between sovereign nations where warfare is widespread and whole oceans are polluted. Iks the most of them.

In this, as in every election year, the current government has made sure that any issue that might anger voters is either out of sight, or sopped into silence. Asset sales? Not this year. Protesting Māori? Leave them to mainstream media. Shoddy health and safety standards in our mines? Reinstate mine inspectors. Deepsea oil exploration? Off the table.

Will any of these silencers and sops last? Unlikely while parliament is full of Iks who see people as labour units and Papatūānuku as an impersonal resource that can be exposed to risk of pollution and sold to the highest bidder.

Back to Lewis. "Once you have become permanently startled, as I am by the realization that we are a social species,” he wrote in 1976, “you tend to keep an eye out for the pieces of evidence that this is, by and large, good for us." Ever since then, I’ve been keeping my eye out and it’s clear. Being a ‘social species’ is not only good for us it’s good for the environment. But only when we bring the Ik factor way down and treat Earth and each other as known and loved members of the whānau.