The Part of the Hummingbird
When an Oasis Speaks to the Planet, the Living Legacy of Pierre Rabhi
There is something vertiginous in certain coincidences. When I discovered the new ERA logo, something stopped within me—as breath stops before a long-sought evidence suddenly revealed.
ERA: this alliance of great and gifted minds gathered around a shared ideal, the eco-restoration of our wounded planet. Being a member was not only an opportunity to learn and exchange. Above all, it was the rare privilege of dreaming together of a more hopeful possible future, of joining the circle of those who refuse resignation and still believe, against all odds, that the world can be saved by the lucid will of men and women of good faith. It is precisely this shared ideal that inspired my strategy of Fertile Hydrology—a concrete response deeply rooted in reality, born in the aftermath of the 2024 floods that severely struck our region, with Kenadsa as a pilot project and a living territory of what is still possible.
And then I saw it: the logo represented a bird carrying a green leaf in its beak. A messenger bird, bearer of hope above turmoil. And something within me immediately recognized the hummingbird—that of the Native American legend, and that of Pierre Rabhi and his book The Part of the Hummingbird.
The one of Kenadsa—his birthplace, where he spent his early childhood before growing up in France and becoming one of the most lucid voices of our time on the question that surpasses all others: how will humanity survive itself? His journey reminds us that answers to the greatest questions of our time sometimes emerge from the most unexpected places.
This Saharan oasis of southern Algeria, at the heart of the desert I inhabit, entered history almost by force at the beginning of the twentieth century, when industrial colonization tore open its depths to extract coal. A wounded land that has never ceased to live, resist, and dream. From this Saharan oasis emerged a child of the desert whose thought would cross borders. Decades later, he would transform the oasis of his childhood into a universal vision, inspiring in France and far beyond the movement of “Oases Everywhere,” as a response to what he called the human, social, and spiritual desertification of modern societies.
The circle, suddenly, was complete.
Kenadsa: Where Everything Begins
To understand Rabhi, one must first understand where he comes from. Kenadsa is no ordinary place. It is an ancient caravan town nestled at the edge of the Grand Western Erg, an oasis that history has crossed like a caravan crosses the desert—leaving behind deep but subtle traces. It is a land that teaches the essential through its very nature: here, water is not wasted. The rare fertility of soils is not destroyed. Life is lived according to what the land can give—no more, no less.
His father was a blacksmith, musician, and poet. He was forced to descend into the mines when colonial France discovered coal beneath the soil of Kenadsa. Thus, as Rabhi writes, “the industrial world imposed itself on us, modifying our traditional way of life.” This is not a simple biographical anecdote. It is the zero point of his entire thought: the moment when a civilization that respected the rhythms of the earth was brutally torn away from itself and thrown into the machinery of productivism.
Kenadsa gave everything to Rabhi: a sense of the sacred in simplicity, the knowledge that the earth is alive, and the deep conviction that the desert—far from being an absence—is a school of essential truths. From this founding experience would emerge his entire philosophy, notably what he would later call “happy sobriety,” an invitation to break with the logic of accumulation in order to rediscover a simpler, more conscious life, more aligned with the rhythms of the living world: not less life, but more meaning.
This vision runs through his work, notably in As in the Heart, So in the Earth—Reversing the Desertification of the Soul and the Soil, as well as The Power of Restraint, where Pierre Rabhi develops an integral ecology deeply linking inner transformation with the restoration of ecosystems.
He defends the idea that the ecological crisis and the crisis of meaning are inseparable, and that the desertification of soils mirrors the desertification of human consciousness.
Discovering the work of Pierre Rabhi, I have often felt that I was rediscovering, under different words, intuitions that have long accompanied me. When the 2024 floods struck our region, my concern was not only to repair the damage, but to understand how to transform a catastrophe into an opportunity for regeneration. It is in this spirit that Fertile Hydrology was born: a strategy inspired by living processes aimed at restoring water cycles, soil fertility, and the resilience of Saharan communities. In its own way, this approach echoes the philosophy of the hummingbird and the ambition now carried by ERA: to restore the Earth not through miracles, but through a multitude of concrete actions, rooted in territories and carried by men and women determined to do their part.
The Legend and Its Truth
In his essay The Part of the Hummingbird, Rabhi recounts a striking Native American legend. One day, a vast forest catches fire. All the animals, terrified, watch the disaster without moving. Only the small hummingbird becomes active, flying back and forth carrying drops of water in its beak. The turtle, irritated, says: “Are you crazy? Do you really think you can put out the fire with those drops of water?” And the hummingbird replies simply: “I know, but I am doing my part.”
This legend has become, in just a few years, one of the most powerful symbols of the global ecological movement. But Rabhi does not tell it as consolation. He tells it as a challenge. The issue is not that everyone should feel reassured by their small individual gesture while the world burns. The issue is that millions of hummingbirds, each doing their part, together form a real force of transformation.
“Such is our responsibility toward the world,” he writes, “for we are not entirely powerless if we choose so.”
This “if we choose so” is perhaps the most important sentence of the entire essay. For Rabhi does not believe in fate. He believes in conscious decision—what he calls “the insurrection of consciousness.”
This thought does not remain theoretical. It becomes action through several initiatives, including the association Terre & Humanisme, and the Colibris movement, which structures the idea of “doing one’s part” as a principle of collective action, along with education and transmission practices inspired by agroecology.
With Colibris, the intuition of the hummingbird becomes a method: everyone can contribute, at their own scale, to the transformation of society—not as an isolated symbolic gesture, but as a living dynamic of cooperation, responsibility, and regeneration of reality.
The Diagnosis: A World on Fire
Before speaking of solutions, Rabhi delivers a diagnosis of striking clarity. Our modern civilization, he argues, rests on a fundamental illusion: infinite growth on a finite planet. We have applied an unlimited principle to a limited world, and we are now paying the price of this collective madness.
The industrial model—born barely two centuries ago, a mere breath in human history—promised to liberate humanity. Yet, as Rabhi observes with a bittersweet irony, modern human life is made of “successive enclosures”: from kindergarten to university, from office to retirement home, everything is a box, a compartment, a confinement. The promised freedom has benefited only a minority, while the majority of humanity remains in precarity and suffering.
Even worse: we have turned antagonism into a principle of life. Individual against individual, nation against nation, religion against religion. What we call “economy” is in reality driven by greed and insatiability transformed into a system. The excess of a minority produces the deprivation of the majority—what Rabhi calls “structural anthropophagy.”
He concludes this diagnosis with a question no one should ignore: if everyone on Earth lived like the average French citizen, we would need two additional planets. Like an American: six to seven planets. We have only one. And we are plundering it.
Agroecology: A Response from the Living World
Pierre Rabhi is not a salon philosopher. A hands-on farmer, he left urban life in France to settle in the Cévennes, on a rocky farm, where he experimented in the daily practice of the land with an approach he would help disseminate under the name agroecology.
Agroecology begins with a simple but revolutionary observation: soil is not a dead substrate meant to receive chemical fertilizers. Soil is a living organism. It is “the site of an effervescence of microorganisms, fungi, yeasts, insects, earthworms” that generate the substances plants need. A plant rooted in this living soil becomes, in Rabhi’s words, “the umbilical cord that transfers substances from the earth and the cosmos to our individual stomach.” Beyond science, he turns it into a vision of the living world, where agriculture becomes a way of inhabiting the world rather than a mere act of production.
This is not poetry. It is biology. And it is also philosophy: we are not separate from nature. We are one of its expressions. To break away from this vital order is to condemn ourselves.
Agroecology, grounded in these principles, brings together two necessities that modernity has artificially separated: feeding people and preserving life. It produces high-quality food without destroying soils, without polluting water, and without eliminating small farmers. It is, Rabhi says, “an alternative and an antidote to agrochemistry.”
His work in this field led him across Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. He trained farmers in Burkina Faso during severe drought years. He showed that the Sahel could be greened again. He demonstrated, against all productivist experts, that sobriety can feed the world.
The Call: Each One Does Their Part
What makes Rabhi unique among ecological thinkers is that he never separates transformation of the world from transformation of the self. Changing structures is necessary and urgent, but not sufficient. Human beings themselves must change.
“If human beings do not change daily toward generosity, compassion, ethics, and equity, society cannot change sustainably.”
This conviction led him to redefine human vocation in terms that resonate as self-evident: our true purpose is not to produce and consume until the end of our lives, “but to love, to admire, and to care for life in all its forms.”
He invites us to a “happy sobriety”—not as deprivation, but as liberation: freeing ourselves from excess in order to rediscover what is essential. To rediscover the taste of water, earth, and bread. To slow down. To listen.
The Circle Closed
I return to the bird on the ERA logo. A bird carrying a green leaf in its beak. A message of life, renewal, and possibility. Like Noah’s dove returning with proof that land is emerging from the waters. Like the hummingbird refusing to surrender to despair with its few drops of water.
Pierre Rabhi was born in Kenadsa, in this desert that is not death but wisdom. He grew up between two cultures, two languages, two worlds. And perhaps it is precisely this dual belonging that allowed him to perceive what so many refused to see: that the Earth is one, that we are all children of the same creation, and that the fire consuming the forest ultimately reaches us all.
His message, at its core, is disarmingly simple. He does not wait for leaders to decide. He does not wait for global summits, universal treaties, or planetary revolutions. He simply says: start where you are. With what you have. With your few drops of water.
Do your part.
The hummingbird is fragile. Its strength lies neither in size nor power, but in persistence. It would be paradoxical to try to save a planet founded on interdependence while discouraging those who, humbly, try to bring their drop of water. The greatest transformations often emerge from the margins, in forgotten territories, carried by voices no one expected.
But perhaps this is also the true lesson of the hummingbird. It is not a solitary hero. It reminds us that every territory has its guardians, every generation its responsibilities, and every era its sowers. One drop alone cannot extinguish the fire. But millions of drops, united by the same will, can change the fate of a forest.
Kenadsa gave birth to a child of the desert who carried this message to the world. Today, as ecological challenges grow more urgent than ever, it is our responsibility to continue this unfinished work—not by repeating Rabhi’s words, but by embodying them in our landscapes, our communities, and our daily choices.
And if we truly decide—collectively, in our lives as much as in our policies—then perhaps these millions of hummingbirds, each carrying their drop of water, can together not only slow the fire, but also, in Pierre Rabhi’s words, “sow the seeds of future centuries.”
For the part of the hummingbird is never finished.
It begins again each morning, with each of us.
Control of vital sea lanes changed on 4 January 2026. The summit ran from 10 to 12 December, while a smaller session was held 3 to 5 January. In the first and second meetings, delegates noted that pre- and post-war policy had shifted dramatically. The report—released without warning—cited “freedom of navigation” as the core issue. Brzezinski’s classic work The Grand Chessboard (1997) argued that “don’t underestimate Russia” and “it’s not over.” The CEO of Maersk said that “Some of these trade routes have been weaponised to an extent that we have not seen before.” A fascinating article titled “The power struggle in the world’s narrow seas” begins like this: 'In 405BC, the Spartans under Lysander targeted the narrow passage now known as the Dardanelles, cutting off Athens from its grain supply. The resulting starvation forced the surrender of an empire. “Such narrow chokepoints are a key vulnerability for global seaborne trade. As one analyst put it: “The sea is ‘the great equaliser’—or so they thought.” “Now those vulnerabilities are being laid bare in the Strait of Hormuz.” Beijing is toying with the idea to “rekindle building a Nicaragua Canal”—to neutralise US control. Russia’s ’90s strategy and the post-war order both shaped today’s alliances.
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