What in the world does the field of water treatment have to teach us about church unity and diversity? Perhaps a lot more than we think.
Jess Brown is a biological drinking water treatment expert at a company called Carollo Engineers, where he leads the firm’s Research and Development program. On a more personal level, he is related to Compassion Connect’s Executive Director Milan Homola and he and his wife Richelle have been partners in our work for many years.
Jess’s experience and research working with diverse strains of bacteria in water treatment systems has revealed that nature has quite a bit to teach the human world about the importance of unity within a community. Intrigued? Read on to learn more!
How did you get into your career in water treatment?
My mom was one of the original tree huggers. She believed in protecting and preserving the environment and she instilled that in us. We never used air conditioning in the summertime in central Illinois; it was brutal. Showers had to be five minutes or less. Recycling and on and on, she was a big advocate for environmental issues so that has always been a big part of who I am.
I knew I wanted to do something with the environment and that led me to my first undergrad, which is a degree in environmental science and public policy. That degree gave me a broad background of environmental issues plus policy and economics, and that helped me realize I wanted to dive even deeper into the technical side of the environment. So I did a second bachelor’s degree in civil engineering, then went on to get my Masters and PhD in environmental engineering. So it kind of started with my mom and then through coursework over time, it narrowed down to environmental engineering. My specific focus is water–water treatment. I work for a firm called Carollo Engineers.
“Everywhere you look in nature you see this concept of diversity creating more resilience and stronger communities. If you’re looking at a natural system, whether it be the gastrointestinal tract, the rainforest, or any city or community, you see that only diverse systems survive and thrive because they’re best equipped to do so.”
Whether it’s drinking water, wastewater, industrial water–if it relates to water Carollo does it. I run the R&D Practice for the firm, which is heavily focused on developing and applying new technologies so that we can treat water more efficiently, at lower cost, with better quality, more resiliently, things like that. So I get to combine the engineering along with the R&D, which is what I did in grad school.
In my grad work I developed a biological treatment system which was based on technology that has been around for many decades. We put old concepts together in a new way to build a more resilient treatment system, and that formed the basis of my PhD research. We use bacteria to remove contaminants from water. The real strength of this approach is that it leverages bacteria to convert contaminants to completely harmless end products. Alternative technologies separate and concentrate the contaminants into a waste stream, which has to be further treated or disposed; they don’t remove the contaminants from the environment. The biological approach is very green, very sustainable.
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Bacteria generally are happy to degrade contaminants because they get energy from it and they do it for free. When I got to Carollo almost 20 years ago, they gave me the opportunity to start scaling that technology up. Long story short, we got a patent for it and it’s now being applied around the country as well as some international locations. Milan came to visit me at the University of Illinois when I was in grad school working on the bench scale version of this technology. Back then it was a little one inch biological reactor, and now they’re twelve foot diameter steel pressure vessels that are the same concept just scaled up.
It’s been very rewarding for me to be able to stand inside of one of these plants, and then remember twenty-five years ago when I was working at the bench scale.
What is it that you’ve discovered through your water treatment career about natural diversity being useful and important in water purification?
You know, there’s a reason we have hundreds of species of bacteria in our gastrointestinal system. You need them to work together and you need some resilience in that community. We see the same thing in our biological water treatment systems; when we sample and identify the microbial communities in those systems we find hundreds of bacterial species. The diversity is really amazing, and since each of those species is programmed to do certain things, that diversity increases the community’s functionality, and therefore expands the treatment capability of that system. For example, if we’re treating a source water that contains multiple contaminants, a biological system with a diverse microbial community is more likely to be able to treat all those contaminants.
On the other hand, if our biotreatment system is based on a pure culture of organisms, that system will likely only remove one of those contaminants, leaving the other contaminants in the water to be removed through additional treatment processes. The increased diversity = increased functionality concept absolutely applies to our communities and workplaces. When a given group is more diverse, a broader range of skills sets and attributes is represented, which means that that group can accomplish more and more efficiently.
“When a given group is more diverse, a broader range of skills sets and attributes is represented, which means that that group can accomplish more and more efficiently.“
The other important component of diversity is resiliency. One of the ways I like to think about it in more day-to-day terms, is through purebred animals. A lot of times you’ll find that purebred animals are extremely susceptible to inherited genetic disorders. They’ve passed down the same traits over and over again and they haven’t built up a robustness or any sort of protection against whatever that genetic disorder is.
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It’s the same thing in a microbial community. With a diverse microbial community in our bioreactors, there’s a good chance that a given environmental stressor (e.g., change in pH or temperature, presence of an antibiotic) will be met with community resistance; a portion of the community may be impacted, but more than likely there will be components of the community that are resistant to that stressor that could shield the vulnerable components and keep the community viable for treating the water. If a biotreatment system is predicated on a pure culture of organisms, and an environmental stressor shows up in the water that impacts that specific organism, the efficacy of your treatment system will be compromised.
“We will continue to witness the indisputable fact that sustainable/greener lives, businesses, and communities are essential to our health, prosperity, and longevity as a human race.”
You can easily see how the diversity/resiliency concept also applies to human communities. A diverse community is inherently built to weather stressors better than a community with a single set of strengths, weaknesses, needs, convictions, and backgrounds. If a stressor hits a less diverse community, the impact may be substantial, as there are limited components of that community available to help weather that stressor…they’re all impacted by the stressor. A more diverse community will have more people and groups that aren’t impacted by a given stressor who can serve and support the impacted community components.
How does this connect to the human world? Have these concepts from nature and science affected you personally or the way you live in this world?
I definitely see examples of the diversity/functionality/resilience concept all around the human world. Take Compassion Connect for example…you bring people with different temperaments, talents, and convictions together to serve the needs of various communities. You don’t insist that team members have to say or believe certain things, or that they bring a single set of tools and talents to the table. You celebrate diversity and in so doing, naturally grow a more functional, resilient, and impactful community to serve. What an amazing model, especially in today’s world where so many forces are intent on dividing us, where diversity is not always celebrated.
The other aspect of biotreatment that I love and believe applies to our world today is its sustainability. Biotreatment is inherently green, as it tends to use less chemicals and energy and creates less waste than other treatment processes.
We will continue to witness the indisputable fact that sustainable/greener lives, businesses, and communities are essential to our health, prosperity, and longevity as a human race.
I know water is your specialty, but can you think of other areas in nature that demonstrate this concept?
Everywhere you look in nature you see this concept of diversity creating more resilience and stronger communities. If you’re looking at a natural system, whether it be the gastrointestinal tract, the rainforest, or any city or community, you see that only diverse systems survive and thrive because they’re best equipped to do so. They have more checks and balances, more functionality, more resilience. I believe this is God’s design.
That’s so great that it’s built into the natural order of things. And yet we as humans so often try to contrive something else.
We love to do that. It’s one of the things we do best and is also one of our worst traits…our desire to create molds, conform communities to a singular set of values and backgrounds, decide who’s in and who’s out. For some reason it makes us feel more comfortable. What we don’t know or have experience with is scary to us, it’s unfamiliar. So it’s a natural tendency for us to try to create things in mold type fashion. But it never works. Diversity will in large part determine our destiny as a human race.
Jess Brown has lived in Southern California for eight years but has also called Illinois, Massachusetts, Idaho, and Florida home. He and his wife Richelle just celebrated their twenty second wedding anniversary and live with their two teenage boys and a Yorkie-Poo named Coco. In his free time he enjoys outdoor activities such as camping, fishing, kayaking, golfing and more.
