A Song in the Night (31 page)

“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:

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.

T
he 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.”

In most HIV patients, he explained, cells that fight infection—“the infantry,” as he referred to them—are present, but they are missing the “general” cells that tell the infantry what to do. The lack of a coordinated defense opens up the human body to attack by the HIV virus, which can then overwhelm the immune system. When the doctors tested my blood, they expected to find a depleted system of generals. Instead they found enormous numbers of them. They had never seen anything like this, and according to Dr. Walker, it “fundamentally changed how the entire field looked at HIV.” “For me it was the first indication that the immune system might actually
be able to get the upper hand against HIV,” Walker told the reporter. “He’s really the person who allowed for that discovery to happen.”

Soon Walker was drawing my blood on a regular basis; sometimes he even stopped by our house himself early in the morning to draw it while we drank coffee and talked about the emerging science. Eventually his laboratory shipped samples of my blood all over the world under the research code name 161J. Walker and his colleague Dr. Eric Rosenberg became my very close friends, and they both joked that I could not leave the Boston area without jeopardizing their supply of blood from what they increasingly referred to as “their gold standard.”

Ever since then Bruce Walker and his army of grad students have been exploring every aspect of my biochemistry and genetics. Once I was introduced to a large group of Bruce’s students at a party at his house. They didn’t recognize my name, but when they learned that I was 161J, they flocked around me as if I were a minor rock star. As more and more years passed after my infection—twenty years, twenty-five years, thirty years—it became clear that I was one of the extremely rare people (fewer than one in five hundred) who have a natural genetic resistance to HIV. My unusual situation has prompted several national documentaries, including a prizewinning film for the science program
Nova
in 1998. The information gathered by Dr. Walker, Dr. Rosenberg, and many others over the years gradually gave Anne and me the confidence to try to have a child. On June 18, 1998, our daughter, Katherine Suzanne Tate Massie, was born—a healthy and
beautiful girl who has the outgoing temperament of her father and the quick intelligence and fiery hair of her mother. After all the anxiety that my infection generated in my first wife, my family, and my friends, it turned out in the end that even though I had been infected for more than thirty years, I had remained immune to HIV.