This volume represents years of autobiographical record-keeping, research, and writing on behalf of Frank Boersma, MD. I am grateful for his forward-thinking consideration of the coming generations of family and friends – that he would dedicate the requisite time and effort to articulate his memories and their surrounding historical context.
In comparison, my task has taken only a couple of years: reading, organizing, researching and fact-checking, finding and compiling pertinent images and explanatory notes, and hopefully, bringing to print a most remarkable and noteworthy life.
I have endeavored to faithfully transcribe Frank’s written records to convey both the content and the intent with which he compiled this autobiographical legacy. With this in mind, I have edited his words for clarity, grammatical accuracy, and readability. To the extent that I could contribute to his stated purpose, I have also researched and inserted relevant photographs, illustrations, and historical facts.
All water is not equal. Just as water is essential to life, clean water is essential to health. And health is an indispensable building block in the development and maintenance of a successful civilization: it opens the opportunity for maturation, education, and productivity; it promotes the cycle of successful survival.
On the other hand, poor health can effectively eliminate those opportunities— at an individual and corporate level. Historically, poverty dynamics are such that when water quality is poor, the people relying on that water supply are also poor. Although tragic, it is also true that most of the world’s poor have no choice but to consume contaminated water.
Providing a sustainable clean water supply for those in underdeveloped countries could significantly interrupt and perhaps even destroy the force of this cycle of poverty. This is not a new thought, nor is it a new pursuit. But when Aqua Clara’s founding members set out to
investigate the subject in 2006, we found a way to push it a few steps further.
Just as we learned basic life lessons from Britain’s history, we can learn many vital lessons from the growing pains of an entirely different country—America. Let us say once again that there are lessons we must understand to effectively approach the challenge of providing the public with adequate supplies of clean, affordable water. So, we turn now to a survey of how civilization and economic development during the early years of the United States history affected living conditions in urban areas.
As we’ve noted before, the field of water remediation is broad and multi-faceted; we’ve determined to intercept a basic segment of the poverty cycle by providing clean, cheap water to those who earn less than $2.00 per day.
This discussion brings us to the third level of our journey to progress: the ‘How?’ level. As we mentioned in the introduction, ACI has studied the topic of water access and water remediation as it has taken place throughout history. We surveyed the treatment methods used, the performance of those methods, and the socio-economic context of their successful application.
In this section, we invite you to walk through the data and the reasoning with us; you’ll see why we’ve deemed the ACI bioreactor as the device most suited to accomplishing our mission. It’s a bit of a hike, but well worth it.
We’ve shown that one very accessible solution, the family-sized bioreactor unit, actually uses the problem to solve the problem. This latter situation is a remarkably odd phenomenon, made possible because the raw water’s bad bugs can be put into a bio-system in such a way as to establish symbiotic killing relationships, leading to clean water at the end of the pipe.
The encouragement we have, in the face of the world’s need, is that the bioreactor process is a viable option for generating clean, cheap water. In this level of the document, we will take a good hard look at the science and engineering behind bioreactor technology; hoping that by doing so, we may stimulate the crystallization of advanced and expanded applications.
Water is never just water. As the universal solvent, it always contains other substances, many of which are harmful to life; the existence of which Aqua Clara’s work strives to minimize or eliminate. In this section, we’ll look at the six categories of water found on planet Earth, their uses, and the contaminants that characterize each particular type.