What Get's Your Attention?

What’s popular that gets your attention? How do children develop their interests? Would you agree it largely depends upon home and school as well as what medium, such as books, TV or the internet, gets our interest and attention? When interviewing people for jobs, I’ve often asked what would they be doing if making money was NOT a priority? This helps reveal their true passion in life! My childhood developed my passion for becoming an environmental scientist and luckily my liberal arts education as well as science degrees gave me well-rounded interests.

So what gets your attention the most now and when you were a child? For me, I’ve been spending a lot of time recently looking at news feeds from my LinkedIn groups where I currently have 1,272 professional connections around the world. I’m also connected to LinkedIn news from very large user groups including the Project Management Network with over 860,000 members, Sustainability Professionals with close to 190,000 members, and Water Pros with over 47,000 members. So in total currently I’m able to reach over a million people through LinkedIn. Social media is having an incredible reach, which I’ll discuss more in a moment.

Looking back, what influenced you the most that got your attention to shape your education and professional interests? Growing up, I was lucky that my Mom’s brother Uncle Allan lived with us and subscribed to the National Geographic magazine — living in the Washington D.C. area I got to meet one of their photographers who attended our church who shared exciting stories about his world travels. The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau was by far my favorite TV show as an adolescent which influenced me to become a natural scientist. His show ran from 1966 to 1975. What a thrill I had in 1984 seeing John Denver perform in D.C. on board the Calypso while docked on the Potomac River with Mr. Cousteau and his family!

The final episode last month of the 12-year Big Bang Theory series, as of May 21st, 2019, attracted 23.4 million TV viewers and the final season was the most watch show of the season (excluding sporting events).

You can probably guess the most watched TV shows. The Super Bowl generates the largest TV audience with the 2015 match between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks attaching the most viewers in TV history with 114 million people! However, viewership has been dropping in recent years with the 2019 game being the lowest in a decade with “only” 98 million according to CNBC.

Incredible are the number of people watching YouTube videos. Several music videos are seeing billions of viewers like Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You with over 4 billion views!

So these days to attract the youth and get their attention maybe we will need to learn to sing and dance?

Which is the Most Endangered River in America?

Of all the rivers to choose from in America, can you guess which one is the most in danger of running dry? Here is a hint, it currently flows through nine (9) National Parks. Let National Geographic show you how and where this mighty river is drying up. For us in the arid west, we all can all help by conserving water: taking shorter showers and installing drip irrigation with native plants. Conservation Colorado and other groups have many activities and events to join.

CBS news reports that not only is this river drying up in America, groundwater depletion is occurring at an alarming rate - an estimated thirteen (13) trillion gallons in a decade. Obviously this is not sustainable.

Does this river make it to the ocean? No, not in the past 50 years - see what affect this is having on the people and the environment as documented by Alexandra Cousteau in a short film Death of a River. She says it would only take increasing the river flow by 1% to enable the river to return to the ocean.

The Nature Conservancy partnered with government scientists to conduct a pulse flow experiment to return water flow to this endangered River!

In future blogs, let's explore how we can contribute to the campaign of returning rivers to the ocean! Contact us at ConserveProsper@gmail.com to find out how we can join together to take action now.