A Song in the Night (30 page)

“The United States is generally behind the world on environmental measurement, and we have little confidence that putting our time and effort into such a domestic enterprise would be useful,” he said.

I waited for him to continue.

“If, however, you are interested in tackling the whole question of a standard for
sustainability
—that is, taking the environment as a key foundation but also looking at human rights, labor practices, community impacts, and all the other ways that corporations and communities interact—then we believe that this could be very exciting.”

I said that this was my intention, and that I would work to win the support of my board. I returned to the United States with a sense of optimism. The logic for building international cooperation was powerful. The United Nations was striving to improve the social impact of businesses in many countries beyond the reach of an American organization like Ceres. At the same time, Ceres had a powerful presence in the United States, the world’s largest economy. It was a creative partnership that both sides decided to embrace.

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 came 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.