Save a Sea Turtle with Your License Plate

When I was younger, I used to imagine the day when I had a driver's license, my own dream car, and, best of all, a personalized license plate. I was gonna get the prettiest license plate my state had to offer and a special name like WRTRGRL or FRNGLLY?I really liked that movie?and be the epitome of cool.

Now I finally have that license and that car and that license plate, and while my plate does have BFG on it, it?s not for the book, it?s just the happenstance of arbitrary license plate number assignments, and I have the plain old California license plate most people do. For now.

Though I realize that what kind of car I drive and how I drive it is what really matters to the environment, vanity plates aren't just there to support egos anymore.

While you may already know that you can get a license plate to support the military and various organizations, there are also a number of plates you can get to help the environment. In California you can support Yosemite, the Lake Tahoe Conservancy, the Coastal Commission, or if you can't decide or like the plain old Cali plate, just by personalizing it with VLLYGAL or LALOVER or whatever you like, your fees go to environmental programs. In Florida you can support the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the Save the Manatee trust fund, and approximately a million more other groups (give or take). Even in Texas, which has Native Texan plates, you can keep your birth state to yourself and adopt a beach or protect the horned lizard instead.

So give in to that childhood impulse to make your license plate the coolest one on the block. The kids on long road trips will thank you, and the whales will thank you, too?or at least you can pretend that's what they're singing about. But just make sure to read the fine print on your license plate. The Texas whitetail deer plate doesn?t go to protect the deer but to support big game hunting.

Just so you know.