The old Wildlife lic…

The old Wildlife license plate in Georgia that raised money for the Georgia Wildlife Resource Division had a picture of a quail and a pine tree on it. The newly redesigned one has a picture of a bald eagle on it. The bald eagle is an especially good symbol for Georgia since, as an Atlanta Journal-Constitution article notes:

Bald eagles are native to Georgia and one of the state’s best conservation stories. They nearly had disappeared from Georgia in the 1970s. Today the birds have more than 80 known nesting areas, and their status has improved from endangered to threatened.

Perfect, wouldn’t you say? Oh no, not to environmentalists. See, their problem with this new plate, the reason why everyone from a canoe and kayak operator in Athens to the CEO of the Georgia Wildlife Federation don’t like this new plate is that behind the eagle you see >gasp< an American flag.

Mike Moody, the kayak operator: “Why did [the state] pick that tag? I have friends who refuse to buy it because it’s so rah-rah….I’m a patriot, but I’m not a gun-toting, flag-waving, Bush-loving patriot.”

Jerry McCollum, Georgia Wildlife Federation: “I thought it was feeding off the patriotic mood our country was in.”

Who in the world would see a flag as a de facto symbol of guns(!) and George W. Bush, or would feel some consternation at the slightest hint of patriotism? If these folks ever get upset about someone questioning their patriotism, we’ll just have to ask how they actually do show it, if at all.

Oh, and the state of Georgia is laughing all the way to the bank.

The proof is in the sales. In its first two months, the new license plate brought in $946,941 — more than half what the old tag averaged over an entire year.

The eagle-and-flag plate has outsold another Wildlife Resources Division tag — featuring a deer and bobwhite quail and aimed at preserving hunting grounds — by 49,839 to 23,895.

Actually, this should be good news to these poor, concerned environmentalists. But politics, even when that political connection is wholly imagined, trumps the birds and the fish and the trees. Give me a good, old-fashioned conservationist any day of the year, one who knows that “hunting” and “conservation” are not contradicting ideas. That’s not a political statement, but to environmentalists it appears that they take it that way, to the detriment of the wildlife they claim to care about.

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