EARTH DAY: KIDS CHAT UP RAINDROPS IN NEW BOOK
For Earth Day, Lake Worth environmentalist unveils children’s book exploring the science of rain-making bacteria.
Almost 50 years ago, Earth Day was created to remind everyone, including citizens, corporations and governments, of the responsibility we all bear for protecting natural resources and insuring the planet’s future and ours on it. This year, a Lake Worth author and recycling industry veteran has created what he hopes is an imaginative, informative way to impart that message.
“It’s, like all of my work, about the connection with the web of life,” explains Keith Bell, who is officially launching his new children’s book “I Wonder What It’s Like To Be A Raindrop: The Rainmaking Bacteria,” at Lake Worth’s Earth Day celebration on Saturday, the day before the official international commemoration. It follows the fantastical journey of two kids who meet three talkative raindrops and the bacteria that live inside them, to learn about how microbes and elements in the environment can create rain.
While the book, featuring colorful illustrations by Lake Worth artist Brent Bludworth, is ostensibly a children’s book, Bell believes that it’s “an adult book in disguise,” educating both kids and their parents about the still-growing investigation into the science of rainmaking bacteria.
Bell’s interest in environmental issues and how they affect the planet and humans goes back to the 1980s when he worked with UNICEF as a radio spokesperson on children’s health in
the Chicago area, and then founded a business working with universities, offices, hospitals and other entities to establish recycling programs. He has also written several articles and letters featured in several publications (including The Palm Beach Post) on Earth Day and environmental issues.
But his research into bacteria began about ten years ago when his dog had an intestinal disorder which doctors “wanted to treat from the neck up” but which Bell, after some reading, began to suspect was caused by gut bacteria. The idea that those bacteria can affect the health of canines and humans alike is an increasingly accepted theory, and Bell says he began to investigate the connection of those microbes in the physical environment as well. In a way, he says, rain-making bacteria is a gut issue as well.
“The idea that atmospheric microbes are responsible for making ice in the clouds that create rain and snow,” says Bell, the founder of The Gut Club, a community of people interested in intestinal health and its overall effect on the body. “It’s like constipation in the clouds. The idea that the dust can impede ice-making ability in a cloud. When it doesn’t rain it’s like the clouds are constipated. My feeling is that when people become aware of the invisible world of microbes, this totally new-found awareness can change the way we act on the planet. It can be almost a linchpin (to an interest) in how microbial awareness is important to health.”
The Earth Day celebration in Lake Worth will feature a rain dance, historically employed by many Native American nations to summon rain from the heavens. Bell says it’s part of the theory that there is a “connection between the ground and the sky in terms of rain, that rain in some way comes from the earth.”
Ultimately, Bell says, he wants the book to trigger the idea that what humans do, whether it’s dancing for rain or recycling, affects other people, that “there is a connection to something outside of ourselves.”