Stagg graduate Peter Gordan enlisted some big names in his effort to help monarch butterflies, including one of the most famous dinosaurs of them all.
In four years, the Palos Park resident turned a research paper about the decline in population of the Monarch butterfly into a mission and passion that resulted in founding his own organization. His high school career was capped by organizing a couple of expos that drew thousands to the Palos Hills school.
The second of his CONEX expos took place in January and drew 2,500 people and 75 vendors. It enlisted the likeness of an extinct creature in the fight to help save the monarchs from extinction, as one of the attractions he was able to provide was a life-sized replica Tyrannosaurus rex skull from the Field Museum in Chicago.
The expos made a bit of money for his organization, Homes4Monarchs, but his time and effort was more to raise awareness about the Monarch butterfly and other conservation issues.
His efforts have not gone unnoticed. He recently received an honorable mention in the 2020 Milton Fisher Scholarship Awards and earned $500. He is a freshman at Columbia University in New York but is taking classes from home because of the pandemic.
The winners were recognized for projects involving arts, science, technology and social action. Out of 18 winners from around the nation, Gordan is the only one from Illinois.
Ian MacLeod, associate principal and activities director at Stagg, was amazed Gordan was able to single-handedly organize the two expos.
“It was absolutely incredible,” he said. “In high school, there are always large events going on. I know what it takes to put those big things together. He literally did this himself. The only thing we did as adults was say ‘yes, you can do it.’
“Here is a kid who is a teenager, and he was working with adults on this level to get people to come in. It was just unreal. He went to the ends of the earth to make these events really special and here is the Field Museum trusting a 17-year-old kid with something that I have to imagine is quite valuable.”
The first expo in 2019 drew 1,000 people on a January day with ice and snow. Gordan toyed with the idea of moving the 2020 expo to April or May but he stayed with January, which was a break because shutdowns resulting from the coronavirus pandemic would have scotched that event this spring. He said he was glad that he was able to host two events.
“CONEX was the ultimate application of scientific awareness,” he said. “It was exposing people to some amazing organizations, many I didn’t even know about until I started calling people.”
Throughout most of his high school career, Gordan and his nonprofit organization distributed seeds of native plants such as milkweed to residents, libraries, train stations, places of worship and nature centers to promote the growth of sustainable garden with food and habitats for butterflies to help increase the population.
Gordan said he worked on a biology project his freshman year in which he found out through his research that the population of the monarch butterfly plummeted 95 % from 1996 through 2016.
“It was crazy,” Gordan said. “I was so shocked when I learned about that because I’ve seen monarch butterflies flying around all the time, and you would never think that an insect so beautiful and so common could be on the verge of extinction within 20 years. At that point I really wanted to do something to help stop the decline and to improve the population.”
He admits he went “Monarch crazy” in high school but now that he is doing a college workload and the pandemic stifling some of the events he has put on including the expos, the future of Homes4Monarchs is a question mark.
“The world has changed so much,” Gordan said. “All of our in-person events had to be canceled. I have to take a hiatus to figure out exactly what I can do. I hope next semester to do more online programming.”
His long-term goals are uncertain, he said, but he hopes that when Columbia opens up in New York again, he can get some Ivy League peers to get involved.
And who knows? Perhaps CONEX will make a comeback.
“To have CONEX back in 2022 would be an ultimate dream goal,” he said.
Jeff Vorva is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.
