Association name and logo

Few ask me, but I’m sure many wonder: Why is the association not simply called “Hirschkäferfreunde”?

Yes, I asked myself the same question a few years after the foundation, but in the meantime I am sure that I have chosen or suggested the right name.

My thesis in 2006 was probably a slap in the face of traditional official and non-official nature conservation, which I had not intended in this way.

The stag beetle as the epitome of a near-natural, primeval forest a banal cultural successor, determined by a forester!? That was probably also too much for a well-known “stag beetle pope” While I published something logical and understandable in the local forest administration, thus very close to the practice, I became – not noticed by me at first – a red rag for functionaries of the nature protection federations and a Minister with her vassals in the country Rhineland-Palatinate, who came 5 years later into the office.

With the association name I wanted to defy admittedly something, express that there is no standstill in nature, what was, must tomorrow no longer so one. Actually logical. We want to guide the stag beetle on a not always straight path into a future and to deal constructively with wind power. This is how the logo came into being (At this point, many thanks again to Hieronymus Pauli for the design).

Then in 2017 the discussion about insect extinction arose, Peter Wohlleben shone as a forest clarifier and climate change began to show its face more clearly.

Since 1950, man has undoubtedly taken over the design claim and dominance over all inhabitants of this earth. He will influence the evolution. In this respect, our association name today stimulates even more reflection: We must continue to take the plants and animals into the Anthropocene, the age of man, not destroy them. If too few manage it, and it looks like they will, our Anthropocene may end in just a few hundred years, because another evolutionary direction will open up, then it will be a nature without humans and perhaps also without stag beetles.