Baden-Württemberg is one fossil richer: where dinosaurs once roamed the landscape long ago, the Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union Germany (NABU) has located it. Name: Peter Hauk, Age: 65 years. Characteristic: a living political heavyweight, CDU, Catholic, hunter, volunteer organist. His discovery will hardly please him — a trained forester who is the state minister for Food, Rural Affairs and Consumer Protection.
The nomination for the “Dinosaur of the Year 2025” is not well meant; on the contrary, it is a mock prize for the worst environmental performance this year. But: why not Federal Chancellor Friedrich Merz? Hauk has been in politics for more than 30 years, but is hardly known nationwide. A call to NABU president Jörg-Andreas Krüger.
The CDU chancellor candidate explained in mid-December at the CSU party congress that he was “not willing to hang the issue of environmental and climate protection so high that a large part of our industrial core in the Federal Republic of Germany would be lost.” Is Hauk proposing that? And party colleague Jens Spahn (“Economy first”) or CSU man Manfred Weber? He leads the conservative European People’s Party (EPP) and blocks climate and nature protection in the European Parliament. “Hauk is doing this too, just more skillfully, so far away from the public eye,” Krüger says.
“He has positioned himself as the chair of the Conference of all German state ministers of agriculture at the head of a movement that wants to strike down the European Nature Restoration Law.” Krüger continues: “That is the nature-conservation portion of the Green Deal, the big new environmental law.” It obliges EU member states to reforest forests, to free rivers from concrete channels, and to re-wet moors that were drained for meadows and fields. “The state of nature should be put right again,” Krüger says. Hauk, however, regards it as a danger.
He has positioned himself as the chair of the Conference of all German state ministers of agriculture at the head of a movement that wants to strike down the European Nature Restoration Law.
Jörg-Andreas Krüger, NABU
With his fellow CDU/CSU state colleagues, he wrote a letter to the EU Commission in June this year. According to it, farmers already have more than enough to deal with tariffs on agricultural products, with droughts across Europe, with the food supply. It would also be expensive; the regulation could entail a financial need of 1.7 billion euros annually. In the end, the request is to “completely repeal” the regulation.
With the letter, a law that came into force in August 2024, already against strong resistance, should wobble again. Germany should actually now design a plan, clarify which areas should be renaturated. Hauk, says Krüger, “practices work refusal.” After all, only intact nature ensures the “yield stability” of farmers, indeed of the economy, because it cleans soils, purifies air, filters water, and stores carbon dioxide.
But for Hauk, as the environmentalist puts it, “agriculture as it was in the old days, production alone, he simply wants to pull more out of the soil.” That is thinking from a distant past, politically not clever either. For if forests were to fall, there would be little greenery in the cities, and this would become immediately noticeable on the ground. That would generate even more frustration at a time when many people feel that things are not going well in Germany. There must be countermeasures to create the feeling: “It can be done!” Something could turn positive.
Krüger calls for giving more importance to the local and telling more about successes: In the renatured Lower Havel in Brandenburg, more pike have started to swim again. Private owners have long since climate-proofed their forests. Repeatedly saying that everything is getting worse does not help.
Are agricultural and business lobbies, which demonize environmental protection as a killer of the economy, simply closer to politics so that they receive more attention? “The narrative that people worry about their jobs, their rents, their pensions is persuasive. It is true, but not the whole story. The majority still wants intact nature,” Krüger says.
With the “Economy First” slogans, however, it is possible “to cling to old concepts, for example the expansion of agricultural yields. That is easier than embracing new ways.” What is needed, however, are people who think about the future and can advocate for it.
Hauk is not that — but a veteran of the old guard. In the long run, this will become more expensive, because that approach cannot sustain Germany’s welfare model in the long term. On Monday, Hauk will be awarded the prize; it weighs 2.6 kilograms and is a tin-cast lizard. Whether he will personally accept it remains open.
