We Become What We Believe
Bob Massie
Response to Boryana Dumyanova Award
Institute for Global Leadership, Tufts University
February 24, 2008

I want to express my deep gratitude to Sherman Teichman, Marcy Murninghan, Bruce Male, Hannah Flamm, and all the faculty and students here at Tufts. Thank all of you for coming. It is a deep honor and a balm to my soul to be the recipient of the Boryana Dumyanova Award.

Ten days ago I had the privilege of attending the Third Institutional Investor Summit on Climate Risk at the United Nations. I would never have believed that such an event could have taken place except that I saw it with my own eyes. Indeed, I imagined it in my own mind, long before it was a reality, in 2002.

Early on the morning after the meeting, I went for a swim in the pool on the 27th floor of the hotel. The sun was rising over the East River, behind UN headquarters, and the light flooded through the glass and made the water around me glow.

I thought about what a peculiar privilege it was to be a mammal swimming in 280,000 pounds of warm water suspended three hundred feet above the ground.

I thought, as I do every day, about why we require so many human beings to live under inhuman conditions so that a so few of us can live in real comfort.

I thought, as I do every day, about how strange it is that we are willing, as a society, to pee such gigantic amounts of carbon dioxide into the swimming pool of our atmosphere.

How could we imagine that such foul behavior would not wreck our earth, that it would not, if unchecked, destroy all but those wealthy and shameless enough to dodge the consequences of this collective folly?(1)

We are taught -- falsely -- that we must accept injustice because of the physical limits of the earth.

We accept -- wrongly -- that what is defines what will be.

We think that we are confined by our material conditions, but I believe that we are mostly hemmed in by our lack of dreams. Too many people - big people, fancy people, powerful people -- have entered the 21st century with 19th century buckets covering their heads. You must help them remove those buckets. That is what Bory would want you to do. You must push them to look at (2) the world we actually live in - and the world it could become.

Take the field of clean energy. Five years ago, at the time of the first Institutional Investor Summit, few fiduciaries or money managers had even begun to consider whether the largest physical changes in the history of human civilization would have any impact on their portfolios. Their attitude was: we never had to think about it before, so we do we have to think about it now?

Now investors worth $15 trillion (3) are beginning to examine the structural absurdity of what Al Gore correctly calls their “subprime carbon investments” and the immense financial opportunities that will arise as the world moves into mind-boggling new technologies. (4)

A McKinsey Global Institute report released last week estimates that the cost of achieving dramatic efficiencies in greenhouse emissions would be $170 billion a year globally. (5) This might seem like a large number until one remembers that this is about the same amount as the stimulus package passed at high speed, without hearings, by a panicky Congress.

What transformations will be possible in the future? We will only find out if we dream the biggest possible dreams.

The United States, the United Nations, the Investor Summit, the swimming pool in the sky - all of these were realities that began as ideas. If there is one motto that I would like you to write down and to pin by your bedsides so that you see it every morning when you wake up, it is this: reality follows ideas.

The Internet seemed huge and untamable until just ten years ago when two graduate students at Stanford wondered if it would be possible to index not just a few things, but everything. (6) Then we had Google.

When the discussion of hydrogen fuel cell cars first came up at the beginning of the decade, leaders and journalists scoffed at the idea of converting 120,000 gas stations at a potential cost of $1,000,000 each - 120 billion dollars! (7) Then we spent more than four times that amount -- $500 billion and counting -- on the war in Iraq. (8)

What lies ahead? It depends on whether you can imagine swimming in the sky.

I believe you will see everyone's individual genome on the Internet. Will that mean liberation from sickness or a harsh new regime of profit-driven discrimination that punishes the ill for their inherited disease? (9)

I believe that you will see the majority of the world's population gain access not only to each other but to the entire intellectual genome of our species -- in other words, education for everyone everywhere for free.

As we move to an entirely new energy economy, we will need to concentrate some power production in specific places, though we must remember that concentrated systems are always vulnerable to pollution and terrorism, corruption and collapse. We must also disperse new forms of energy and technology directly into the human communities that need it.

When post-apartheid South Africa wanted to give telephone service to millions, they realized that they could skip laying phone lines and go straight to cellular. (10)

We see that kind of leap-frogging all around us. China is building 40 new cities in the next ten years and every single building in every city may have high-speed wireless Internet. (11) Those buildings could control their internal temperature the way in a similar manner to the way our brains control temperature in our bodies, creating a whole new universe of efficiency, savings, and prosperity. Or they could watch our every move.

One brilliant couple is designing phosphorescent cloth that absorbs sunlight during the day and releases it during the night. (12) With this there is no need for C02 emitting power plants or high voltage lines that cut through the rainforest. Do you need to read in the dark? Unfold the cloth. Do you want to go to sleep? Roll it up. (13)

Another group of scientists is tapping kinetic energy through a light knee brace that captures the forward motion of walking. Humans eat food created through sunlight, then translate that food into calories and movement. That movement, if captured in the brace, could create enough electricity to power cell phones or pace makers, or heat the body in cold climates, or run a small computer, even a small business. (14)

A team of students responding to a $5,000 challenge from Google.org seem to have to solved the problem of transporting, filtering, and storing clean water for poor people through a cheap tricycle. The container is built into the frame of the trike. The pedaling power pushes the water through a filter and into a reservoir in front of the handlebars, where it can be stored away from contamination by larvae or bacteria - until the person needs to bike back for more. (15)

There are millions more such ideas imbedded in your minds and of those around you.

Will such inventions move us forward or backward? We will reverse poverty and climate change -- or will we accelerate them? That depends on our mental and moral commitments - your mental and moral commitments.

Every one of you sitting here is harboring dozens of viruses that are being suppressed by your invisible immune systems. (16) If your invisible immune system failed, you would rapidly be covered, for example, by very visible warts. This suppression is an unconscious gift from our ancestors. Similarly, every day we make choices that support or suppress the moral immune systems of our society.

Do we seek security - or do we seek justice?

Do we blame - or do we forgive?

Do we fear - or do we love?

It will be up to you - and people like you -- whether tomorrow's inventions will be stolen by the cruel and the powerful -- or employed to achieve prosperity and democracy for all.

Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank and winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, recently told an interviewer that poverty exists because human beings have accepted -- and continue to accept -- the idea of poverty. “You create what you imagine,” he said. (17)

Reality follows ideas.

In sum: most of the choices ahead will not be driven but what lies outside in the physical work, but what lives inside our hearts and spirits.

If we become what we believe, (18) then what will you choose?


The Rev. Dr. Robert Kinloch Massie (www.bobmassie.org) is the founder of the Global Reporting Initiative (www.globalreporting.org), the former executive director of Ceres (www.ceres.org); and the one of the originators of the Investor Network on Climate Risk (www.incr.org). He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.


NOTES

1) Speech given by Dr. John Holdren, Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy and Professor of Earth and Planetary Science, Harvard University; Director, Woods Hole Research Institute; Chairman, American Academy for the Advancement of Science - see www.ceres.org/NETCOMMUNITY/Document.Doc?id=282

2) www.incr.com

3) www.csrwire.com/News/11002.html

4) http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-UN-Climate-Investors.html?ex=12...

5) Diana Farrell, “The Case for Investing in Energy Productivity,” McKinsey Global Institute, released February 14, 2008 - www.ceres.org/NETCOMMUNITY/Document.Doc?id=280

6) Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, “The Anatomy of A Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Stanford University 1998 - original paper still posted at http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

7) http://www.infoplease.com/askeds/number-gas-stations-us-1995.html

8) http://www.nationalpriorities.org/costofwar_home

9) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/health/24dna.html?bl&ex=1203915600&en=...

10) “Infrastructural Investment in Long-run Economic Growth: South Africa 1875-2001”. J.W. Fedderkea, P. Perkinsb and J.M. Luizb _aUniversity of Cape Town, South Africa_bUniversity of the Witwatersrand, South Africa _Accepted 9 November 2005. Available online 5 April 2006. World Development Volume 34, Issue 6, June 2006

11)“Cisco to network whole cities” by Kevin Allison in San Francisco, FT.com site; Dec 23, 2007
“Cisco Systems, the world's biggest maker of data networking equipment, plans to launch a business group, based in Bangalore, India, that will wire new buildings and even entirely new cities with state-of-the-art networking technology… China estimates it will need to build 40 cities over the next 10 years to accommodate migration of workers from the countryside.”

12) Sheila Kennedy and Frano Violich of Kennedy Violich Architects www.kvarch.net/

13) www.portablelight.com; for an interview with Sheila Kennedy about application and acceptance among Mexico's Huichol populution, see http://www.theworld.org/?q=node/9196

14) http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080207140751.htm

15) http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/team-aquaduct-wins-innovate-or-di...

16) http://www.answers.com/topic/wart?cat=health; see many other Google references under “verruca” and “immune suppression”

17) http://povertynewsblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/if-you-think-poverty-should-...

18) See the concluding chapter to Robert Kinloch Massie, Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years (New York: Nan Talese - Doubleday, 1998)

From Bob on 2/17/08:

I just got back from the Third Institutional Investor Summit on Climate Risk at the UN -- I had to push extremely hard to get through this event, but it was an enormous pleasure to see so many friends and to watch this idea that had seemed crazy a few years ago blossom into something so huge. The information about the event is at www.incr.com. The people at Ceres worked amazingly hard to make it all happen. Tim Wirth of the UN Foundation was a model, as always, of graciousness and Mindy was a powerhouse urging investors to act boldly and to invest in the dramatic transformations that will be taking place as new technologies come online. A report released by the McKinsey Global Institute highlighted that much of the growth in energy demand -- 2/3 of it outside the United States -- could be achieved through efficiencies. The vivid presentation by Professor John Holdren of Harvard (the current president of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science) made it absolutely clear that climate change is accelerating and must be tackled aggressively and immediately. He made this point again in a news conference yesterday.

I had the chance to meet the Secretary-General of the UN and many other interesting and notable people. Of course people tended to think I am doing well because I assiduously rested before every gathering and took naps and stayed in my room at night. Then I went out to the meeting and the reception and my natural extraversion took over and I was able to forget momentarily that I am carrying a piano on my back.

I had an amusing encounter with Al Gore, who was the speaker at lunch. He gave an incredible speech in which, among many things, he said that since it was clear that sooner or later there was going to be a price on carbon and that because of this he hoped that every major investor would scour their portfolio and get rid of their "sub prime carbon investments." With McCain, Clinton, and Obama all supporting the idea of carbon caps his logic seems impeccable, though many investors remain clueless. This no longer surprises me. I read a report about the likely downgrading of bond insurers in the Financial Times back in November -- it seemed all but inevitable. But now that it is happening everyone is acting as though it was completely unthinkable until last week. Thanks to my cousin-in-law Murray who sends me fascinating articles, I am now reading the views of people like Bill Gross of Pimco who nailed the details of what is happening in a great piece last month.

At the end Gore took questions and I asked him about the challenge that investors had in knowing more about a company's sustainability and climate performance. I said that I heard him talk about "full spectrum reporting" and that perhaps he would like to comment on this. I was hoping it would prompt him to mention the importance of the disclosure of climate risk and other key sustainability elements.

I had asked the question for a specific reason. When he gave a keynote talk in Amsterdam eighteen months ago at the Global Reporting Initiative conference in which the new "G3" version of the guidelines were released, he had spoken to 1,200 people from 67 countries about the importance of, as he termed it, "full spectrum reporting." He said that he had learned in high school that visible light is only a small portion of the spectrum; the full band includes infrared and ultraviolet and beyond. When he was vice-president, he used to get a daily intelligence briefing in which information had been gathered across all of these, and this information was far more comprehensive and revealing than what one could see from a visible-light photograph. He used this analogy to suggest that it was important for investors to go much deeper in assessing companies than was possible through the use of traditional financial statements -- that there needed to be "full spectrum disclosure" by companies and thorough assessment by investors of the total picture. I of course agree with this since current accounting rules apply nineteenth century concepts to twenty-first century realities, which is one reason why people are able to game the system through off-balance sheet tricks and leveraged debt obligations. (I personally believe that if every company in the United States had been pondering and reporting on the social and community impact of their practices, the flimsy and fraudulent sub prime process would have been curtailed or prevented because it would have been obvious that it could not be sustained).

In any case, Gore offered, again, a pithy and excellent summary of the need for a complete, generally accepted form of disclosure. He then stopped and looked at me. "Is that what you were looking for?"

"Well," I said, "I was kind of hoping that you would mention the Global Reporting Initiative."

And the whole room burst out laughing -- I guess many people know that my commitment to action on climate is linked to my belief that companies must see their actions as part of a broad definition of sustainability, a definition that includes tackling poverty, as Prof Holdren and many others at the conference stated. "Of course," said Gore, smiling. Then he said strongly supportive things about the GRI.

I had not intended this in any way to be a commercial, but I guess my passion for the work of both Ceres and the GRI was pretty obvious. I am sorry that I will not be well enough to go to the GRI conference in May in Amsterdam because so many things are happening globally, many of which are leaving America behind. The Swedish government is requiring all state-owned companies to report according to GRI by 2009. 87% of emerging market companies now issue sustainability reports. You can see all this at www.globalreporting.org

I really appreciated everyone's warmth. I have also noted that for those people I have known for a long time it can sometimes be hard for them to comprehend the idea that I am neither much better nor much worse than over the last year. I think culturally as Americans we like trend lines -- up or down. A flat line seems strange and people don't quite know how to react to it -- of course I don't really either. Sometimes the conversation was able to go a little deeper, or people knew that I have received five calls for possible transplant since last October. Everyone thinks that is encouraging, and I guess I do too, except that I know that this is so variable. I could be called tomorrow or not for another year. I wouldn't mind waiting as much if I didn't feel so crappy.

Quite a few people told me of their experiences with serious health problems -- either personally or with close family members or friends. One young man told me that his father got a liver transplant five years ago, when he was 51 (my age) and that he now, at age 56, plays basketball three times a week. Wow! I found that hugely encouraging. It also reminded me of the joke about the man with the broken arm who asks his doctor

"Doctor, when I get my cast off, will I be able to play the violin?"

"Why, of course!" says the doctor.

"That's wonderful," says the man, "because I couldn't play it before."

I don't think that with my knees I will be playing basketball any time soon, but the idea that his father came through the surgery so well and now feels such vigor was a source of great hope.

That's all for now. Back to resting, reading, and taking care of Anne and Kate who have both had the flu.

There was an article in the January 25 edition of the Financial Times that mentions Bob. But I totally disagree with the author...Bob is indeed a social entrepreneur!