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Spring
2002
Tegan
Campia :
Earth Keeper
In
first grade Tegan Campia recruited classmates to help clean
up local roadsides. From modest beginnings, her Clean-Up
Club has become an annual tradition. Protected by heavy
gloves, boys and girls follow the Campia’s tractor-pulled
wooden wagon, gathering debris from along the wooded lanes
of their neighborhood. Tegan also rallied friends to join
her in planting wildflowers and trees for Earth Day at the
Lockhart Family Nature Center, part of the Lake Forest Openlands
Association where her father Ken is past president.
Wherever
she looks, Tegan finds creatures to study and care for.
When rains flood her neighbor’s goldfish pond, Tegan
pulls on her yellow rubber boots and rushes out to rescue
the hapless goldfish stranded in her yard. Noticing that
young deer injured their hind legs jumping over barbed-wire-topped
cyclone fencing, she and her mother grabbed their wire cutters
and removed the barbed wire. They’ve also cut a ground-level
opening in the fence for the baby geese that shuttle across
their lawn between neighboring ponds.
"Once
we found a goose egg in the backyard," recalls Tegan.
"I put it in a cage with a heat lamp, but it never
hatched." Another discovery, a small skull unearthed
in an abandoned barn, was carefully studied but never definitively
identified.
Tegan
and her mother, Karen, have rescued tiny saplings, transplanting
them from around their property to a makeshift nursery in
their back yard. Marked with bright orange plastic tags,
the cottonwood, shagbark hickory, oak and maple seedlings
are now safe from the lawn mower’s blades.
After
all her instinctive nurturing, Tegan became an official
"Earth Keeper" upon completing a three-day environmental
curriculum conducted by Lake Forest Openlands for all Lake
Forest fourth graders. "Earth Keeper showed us the
food web and we learned how herbicides make their way from
our lawns into the water. We saw the connections,"
Tegan explains. "Now I respect everything about nature
much more."
—
Cindy Mehallow
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