Lhe Native American legend of the hummingbird has it that a gigantic forest fire was extinguished thanks to the individual action of a tiny bird, weighing just a few grams. The exemplary determination of the hummingbird would have led it to multiply the back and forth between a small pond and the source of the fire in order, drop by drop, to water the flames as much as it could and try to contain the fire. forest. It is this unfailing determination which is presumed to have spread to the other inhabitants of the forest, thus convinced of the need to also act, within their own means, to overcome the problem. fire. “Take your part” is the formula used to designate the particular ethics that guided the hummingbird’s action. Is this the meaning of the injunction made to the company in the face of contemporary ecological crises?
The imperative for greater sobriety in the use of natural resources, however, seems to have met a more disastrous fate than the forest of Native American legend. The exemplary behavior of the hummingbird struggles to find an equivalent in the unique ecosystem of business life. At the very least, the initiatives of a few pioneering companies suffer from not being able to catch on with their counterparts.
In such a context, it is both the ethical and moral function of the company but also the directions in which it must direct its strategies and management techniques which are immediately questioned. Between 2010 and 2017, CAC 40 companies significantly increased their environmental footprint, particularly if we take into account imported emissions attributable to the relocation of their production facilities (“Large French Companies: a disastrous impact for society and the planet!”, Pierre Grimaud and Dominique Plihon, Observatoire des multinationales/Attac, 2019).
Denial is no longer appropriate
At the same time, their environmental management practices demonstrate a stronger appetite for announcements of a future transition than for the mitigation of their impacts here and now. We would be tempted to deduce from this that the hummingbird is definitely not a metaphor transferable to the business world, or that this world is perhaps not as interdependent as is the biotope of primary forests. However, this is undoubtedly a partial interpretation.
A trend, quite recent, allows us to observe an awareness of managerial elites regarding the inseparable nature of the link between business resilience and ecological resilience. In fact, in the meantime, the work of objectifying the Anthropocene phenomenon undertaken by the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has happened; or, at the national level, the projections established by Ademe, in its report “ Transitions 2050 » published in 2023, on the socio-economic impacts of different global warming scenarios. The hummingbird seems, in this context, to have no other choice than to try to save the ecological niche on which it depends, under penalty of disappearing with it.
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