A Song in the Night

by Bob Massie

  The daily demand to solve the problems of logistics and diplomacy required steady and energetic leadership. Sometimes I didn’t have time to think. Yet every now and then I was able to pause and consider what we were really trying to do, which was to create a system that would help people and protect the planet. The passion within me was tied to an image that floated in my mind like a dream: a particular photograph of our fragile blue planet hanging in space.

  I had first seen it and loved it when the Apollo 17 astronauts returned from the moon in 1970. Their picture showed the earth fully bathed in sunlight from the South Pole. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I had become aware of the problem of greenhouse gases building up in our atmosphere, slowly creating the invisible blanket of heat-trapping gases that have been steadily distorting the climate of the entire planet. After attending a key meeting in 1991 of some of America’s top scientists and religious leaders at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, I learned more about the dangerous path on which humanity had launched itself. Scientists from around the world were documenting the steady accumulation of greenhouse gases, the resulting rise in average global temperature, the melting of polar ice, and other disturbing trends. Though planetary science is complex, it was clear that allowing human activity to raise the temperature of the planet would lead to more severe weather, including more violent storms, droughts, and floods, which could harm hundreds of millions of people and cost trillions of dollars in property and economic damage.

  To make sure that the religious community played an important role, I went to the dean of Harvard Divinity School early in 1991 to ask him to allow me to organize an event in Massachusetts that would enable faculty members from the nine seminaries in the Boston Theological Institute, a cooperative group, to learn more about the climate crisis and to consider how they could integrate these ideas into their curricula. Working with a talented group of graduate students, we secured permission to use the IMAX theater at the Boston Museum of Science, which was showing The Blue Planet, a mesmerizing film shot from space by the space shuttle astronauts. My goal was to combine these powerful images with both scientific information and practical reflections about what could be done by the schools. We scheduled the event for April 1992, and we invited Senator Al Gore, who had not yet been chosen for the vice presidential position by Governor Clinton, to come to Boston to speak. We titled the event “The Renewal of Reverence: Theological Education in the Environmental Era.” We filled the hall with well over three hundred people.

  What has stayed with me ever since are the quiet moments of the evening, as we watched the shuttle fly silently through space and record the aching beauty of Earth. From far above the planet we saw no division of the blue of the atmosphere from the green of our vegetation. Sitting there, I realized that there should be no such divisions in human thinking. Blue might represent labor and green might represent the environmental movement, but we needed to bring them together. Blue might represent the earth and green might represent the economy, but we needed to bring them together. That became my goal and my task.

  In asking how the Global Reporting Initiative actually got off the ground, people tend to wonder about three things: first, the mechanics; second, the people; and third, the problems that we overcame. Because of the eventual global success of the GRI, these have now been documented by scholars and academic researchers in many languages. As the cofounder and chair for those first years, I can offer a few insights.

  First, the mechanics. We conducted an open-source process. Anyone who wanted to be part of the project could participate. The role of Ceres—and then the role of the secretariat, when it emerged—was to help anyone who desired to play a role to do so. Initially that meant that people who were interested in water use and pollution could come together and think about how to measure that. It meant that people who cared about the overall content of a sustainability report could offer their views on that. In the early days, we assigned people who had skills and interests directly to the relevant committees and let them hash out their concerns, without trying to dictate their decisions in any way. We were immensely aided by the sudden rise of the Internet in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. If we had tried to create the GRI just a few years before, it would have been impossible for the far-flung participants to communicate with each other rapidly. Instead, we could hold an in-person meeting, carve out the basic ideas, and then circulate multiple iterations of a draft within weeks—all globally, instantly, and for free. The speed of our success created its own excitement, as people realized that something was really happening and that if they wanted to be involved, they should jump on now.

  We also benefited from a marvelous steering committee from many disciplines and parts of the world. At the beginning we had strong representation from Europe and North America. We expanded to bring in representatives of Ford, General Motors, ITT Industries, and Royal Dutch Shell, major environment groups, top international labor officials, senior officials from accounting societies from Europe and Canada, and NGO leaders from Australia, Colombia, Japan, South Africa, India, and other countries.

  The reaction I received from one Canadian participant, a nationally recognized leader in accounting, moved me particularly. He came to me and said, “You know, I was starting to reach the end of my career, and I realized that I wanted to be involved, if possible, in one more major effort to change the way the world works. I didn’t know if such a possibility would emerge. But I wrote down what I was looking for on a little piece of paper so that if I ever found it, I would remember to be grateful. I have kept that paper in my wallet ever since. Would you like to see it?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He pulled his wallet out of his pocket and withdrew a sliver of paper. On it he had written, “I want to be involved with a major international effort to rewrite the rules of accounting so that business contributes to the true well-being and sustainability of our beautiful planet.” He put the paper away and looked at me with tears in his eyes.

  “I wrote this before I had ever heard of you, Bob Massie,” he said, “so I thought you might like to know that this whole effort is, in part, the fulfillment of a middle-aged accountant’s deepest prayer for his life.”

  We also encountered opposition. While Allen White did a brilliant job as cofounder, wrestling the technical details of the GRI to the ground, my function, particularly as chair of the steering committee, was to keep everyone focused on the same goal and moving productively in the same direction. Many people found the effort disturbing, even shocking, and they were more than happy to inform me of their objections.

  Regularly I would be approached by someone with a face that expressed distaste or even anger and who would thrust a finger into my chest.

  “I have to tell you, Bob, that this whole enterprise is poorly conceived and is likely to fail.”

  “Why do you say that?” I would ask, knowing that this is what the person wanted to tell me.

  Then the person would launch into a litany of complaints: this was being done wrong, this person had been left out, this other person was a fool who would destroy everything, we should have approached some other group to do some other thing instead—the list was always long and vehemently expressed. The conclusion was always that disaster was imminent. When the person stopped talking, he or she clearly expected me to defend myself. I tried a different approach.

  “You know, I think you are probably right,” I said. “We may fail. Many of the problems you described are real problems that we need to address, and I don’t know if we are going to be able to do it in time.”

  The person would nod with satisfaction.

  “I do know one thing, though,” I continued, “which is that it would be less likely to fail if I had your participation in it. You obviously have given considerable thought to what needs to happen. You would be in an excellent position to help us figure out a solution.”

  The transformation in the person’s attitude was often remarkable. Sometimes it ca
me immediately, but usually it took about six months. At that point I would receive an abrupt e-mail: “Bob, I have given what you said a lot of thought, and now I am ready to help.”

  So, over the next three years, we held dozens of meetings all over the world to enlist support. The steering committee made a point of rotating among different cities and institutions, and Allen and I traveled on special road trips that took us to India, Japan, Brazil, South Africa, Kenya, and many other places. We met with business executives, government officials, academics, and NGO leaders. We received millions of dollars in funding from the United Nations Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the General Motors Foundation.

  At one point my director of development, Tim Brennan, and I flew to Seattle for a forty-five-minute meeting with a program officer from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to discuss the possibility of a specialized project in which we would measure the prevalence of HIV in southern Africa among workers in labor-intensive industries like sugar and mining. They were interested and asked for a briefing from Allen White, who was leading the research. Allen and I called from separate phones a few days later. Allen brought up the topic of funding.

  “Well, I don’t know,” said the program officer. “For this kind of thing it would have to be a discretionary grant.”

  I knew Allen was disappointed. Discretionary grants usually amounted to only five to ten thousand dollars.

  “How much would that be?” he asked tentatively.

  “Well, it would have to be under one million dollars,” said the officer apologetically.

  I thought I heard Allen stifle a cough on the other end of the line.

  In the weeks ahead, we worked up a budget for $970,000 that would allow us to do a top-notch job. We sent off the proposal with great uncertainty. Three days before the 9/11 terrorist attacks a plain envelope arrived in the regular mail. I opened the letter and out fell a check for the full amount.

  During this period various working groups were busy designing the guidelines. To demonstrate the clear compatibility of our effort with financial accounting, we worked with accounting experts to adopt the core principles of transparency, inclusiveness, auditability, and completeness. Differences in language and perspective required a delicate and careful hand. At one point relatively early in the process, I urged that the GRI commit to a certain “form” that would enable people to understand how the information was being collected and used. Roger Adams from England objected vehemently. The GRI did not need a form, he said. I continued: but how could the GRI function if we did not give it a particular structure?

  “I’m all for structure,” he said. “I just don’t think that the GRI should have a form.”

  A light bulb went off in my head. “What do you mean by the word ‘form’?” I asked.

  “You know—a form, a questionnaire,” he said testily.

  I laughed. I realized that though we were both English-speakers, we had stumbled on the different meanings of the same word. “ ‘Form’ does not automatically mean ‘questionnaire’ in American English,” I told Roger.

  “Well, it does where I am from!” he said.

  After several years it became clear that the original experiment to see whether organizations from around the world could be drawn into working on a common measurement for sustainability had been a success. The question then became whether it was now time to spin off the organization from Ceres into an independent group with a completely new board. We made the decision to “institutionalize” at a key meeting with board members and funders in Toronto in 2000, and within two years we had met that goal as well.

  On April 4, 2002, hundreds of people assembled from around the world at United Nations headquarters in New York to celebrate the inauguration of the GRI as a permanent standard-setting body. To create a strong wind at its back, we had assembled a “charter group” of twenty-six international organizations, including huge activist organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Greenpeace, and the World Conservation Union, to participate. We also had the support of the United Nations, a host of global corporations, and major accounting and sustainability organizations everywhere. Leaders from around the world sent their best wishes and expressions of support. “Companies that win the public’s confidence and trust are open, visible, engaging, and create business value while delivering benefits to society and the environment,” wrote Bill Ford, the chairman of Ford Motor Company. “The Global Reporting Initiative guidelines … provide the disclosure framework that businesses need to report fully on their economic, environmental, and social performance.”

  As I stood before the group that morning in the delegates’ dining room at the UN, I found it hard to get a grip on my emotions. In less than four years, we had taken an idea that seemed completely unreasonable and created a powerful new body that was already transforming the world economy. The guidelines had been translated into eight languages and were in use by hundreds of corporations; they were well on the way to becoming the standard for global measurement and performance.

  Along with Timothy Wirth, the president of the United Nations Foundation, and the head of the United Nations Environment Programme, Klaus Töpfer, I was one of the main speakers. I started with a reference to the biblical story of the mustard seed, in which something impossibly small at the beginning grows into something impressively large at the end. How did that happen? I asked. “It grew whenever an individual human being decided to participate, to contribute something,” I told the group. “Every decision by every person to add an idea, to offer assistance, to articulate a critique in the spirit of improvement, helped it to grow.”

  At the same time, this was still an inauguration, a beginning. We had started something important, but we were not finished. The challenges that we faced in the world were bigger than any one country or part of society; they reflected a challenge to our whole industrial civilization, as we attempted to create prosperity for the people without damaging the planet. I quoted a portion of a beautiful poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

  Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

  And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

  And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

  Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

  And for all this, nature is never spent;

  There lives the dearest freshness deep down things …

  We had engaged in the effort to create the GRI, I said, because even though we understood the value of work and growth and prosperity, we did not want to live in a world known only for being seared with trade and smeared with toil. We wanted to believe that human dignity and earthly beauty could also be protected and enhanced. “We have been bold,” I concluded, “but we must be bolder still.”

  I stepped down from the podium—and thus from the chair of the first board—to an ovation, and I knew that one major piece of my life had just come to an end. I just didn’t realize how conclusive that end truly was or how hard would be the new challenges I was about to face.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Life AND Death

  The night before the launch of the Global Reporting Initiative I stayed in a small hotel a few blocks from UN headquarters. The Ceres team ran to the building early the next day to make preparations, and I had the chance to walk over alone, enjoying the sunshine and light breeze of an April morning. Even though the distance was only a few blocks, the trip was not easy. My left knee replacement had worked well, but now, nearly four years later, my right knee had degenerated into a painful joint. Bone scraped on bone, causing me to wince with every step. It was obvious that the right knee was also going to have to be operated on. I had traveled around the world with constant pain, waiting until we had completed the task of setting up the GRI, but now the surgery loomed, in less than six weeks.

  I was also tired—more tired than I should have been. It had been demanding to run two organizations at once—to serve as the chief
executive of Ceres and the chair of the GRI steering committee at the same time. It meant that in addition to making all the daily decisions, I was leading a board meeting in some capacity every six weeks, usually in different cities. I was fortunate that Allen White had taken over the interim CEO position for GRI and moved to Amsterdam to make sure that events ran smoothly there, but I was still responsible for much of the large-scale design and diplomacy of the new institution. Over time the cumulative effect of the travel and the responsibility had started to wear me down, but I sensed that something potentially more serious was wrong with me. When the ceremony at the United Nations ended, I was once again exhausted, and I knew that it was time for another round of tests.

  Often, even though life can be terribly painful, one is blessed with a moment of mercy. Eight years before, I had been struggling with the shock of having lost my marriage, but soon afterward something unexpected and totally wonderful happened: I reconnected with a woman whom I had known very slightly in college. Anne Tate was a brilliant, beautiful, redheaded architect. We had many friends in common, and she had supported me during the campaign. When it became clear that Dana was never going to change her mind, Anne and I started to spend more time together. Within months I had fallen deeply in love with her, and after a year of courting, she agreed to marry me. We were engaged in 1995 and married in June 1996, and she has been the source of most of my happiness ever since.

  Since the issue of HIV had been so destructive in my first marriage, I decided to present myself to doctors in the Boston area to ask them if they had any idea why I was still healthy. By testing frozen samples of my blood that they maintained for routine federal studies, they established conclusively that I had been infected in 1978. I realized with a shock that the mysterious illness that had forced me to withdraw from Yale Divinity School had, in fact, been the acute symptoms of initial HIV infection. Now, seventeen years later, I seemed to be brazenly defying the odds. Eventually I met Dr. Bruce Walker, an infectious disease scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital. “I had my doubts at first about whether he was really infected,” he explained to a reporter several years later, “but we confirmed that very quickly and discovered that his viral load was below the limits of detection. That went against what we thought HIV did. It made us extremely interested in learning how he was able to succeed in combating this while others were clearly failing.”