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Welcome to the Weird and Wonderful World of Water

I started to write this as a welcome message for people joining the Gbiota social movement but it got a bit off track, but I had fun writing it and you may have fun reading it so I am sticking with it.

Pretend you are some creature from way out there in space and had never seen water—if a three-year-old kid can pretend, then so can you.

You are welcomed into some friendly human’s house and invited to a cup of coffee (despite you being bright purple with a single eye waving about on a long stalk). They take some black powder out of a jar labelled Nescafe and some white powder out of another jar labelled sugar and put it into a cup.

They take some funny clear fluid from a pipe, pour it into a jug, heat it until it bubbles, then pour it into the cup. Suddenly you see one of the greatest magic tricks of all time—the black and white powders just disappear. You look under the table for false chambers or tiny holes, but no—those powders have just vanished from this decidedly odd planet.

The friendly humans explain that they haven’t disappeared—they have simply gone into solution. Molecules break down into bits that react with other molecules, and that’s how food works: dissolving what we eat so our bodies can use it. That’s why water is essential for life on this planet.

The humans explain that giant oceans cover the Earth. The sun heats the oceans, turning the water into invisible vapour that floats around with the wind. High up in the sky it cools, reforms into tiny droplets, and becomes clouds—massive floating storage tanks of water.

Eventually these droplets join together, become heavy, and fall as rain.

Over millions of years this rain soaked into the Earth until the ground became saturated with billions of tonnes of water. When it can hold no more, the excess runs off the surface in what humans call rivers.

For hundreds of thousands of years humans lived beside rivers because they cannot survive without water.

Then people invented pumps—great fun at first—sucking water out of the ground and splashing it everywhere, perfect for growing crops and feeding more and more people.

But that fun didn’t last. The soil deteriorated, people became fat and sick, and diseases appeared that had never been major problems before.

Then along came an oddball guy—slightly OCD about water—who said that if humans were going to keep having fun, they needed a better way of using water and growing food. And so the Gbiota social movement was formed.

So welcome aboard—and let’s have some fun growing real food using this weird and wonderful thing called water.

I started writing about water in 1995 when the web first opened up. My first website was www.waterright.com.au, followed by www.wickingbed.com.

The web was very different in those days. Search engines barely existed. You simply found a website and followed links to another and another—each night a completely different adventure.

It was a friendly era of the internet.

There weren’t many websites, so www.waterright.com.au became very popular. I keep it alive because there are still many useful articles for anyone with the patience to explore.

My focus back then was environmental: humans were pumping water from ancient aquifers that took millions of years to form, and it was clear they would eventually run out.

Excess irrigation caused salinity. Chemical agriculture destroyed soil biota—the very creatures that create new soil. But environmental issues rarely inspire action. People assume the magical “them” will sort it out.

By 2015, however, I realised something even bigger—gut biology. Our intelligent control system. The root cause of a global health epidemic. So I set up www.gbiota.com to focus on growing food in nutrient-rich, biologically active soil to feed our gut.

But by then the web had become commercial and toxic—full of manipulation, misinformation, and hostility.

So I created www.gbiota.club, a private social media site, and www.pickandeat.shop—a marketplace without pressure selling.

I learned how to link these independent sites so users can move between them seamlessly through the menu—community for gbiota.club and shop for pickandeat.shop. The only confusion is logging in, because each site has its own login area.

The bigger challenge, however, is the old enemy—paradigms and money. The belief that population growth created food shortages and therefore industrial chemical farming is essential.

This is wrong. Food production is rising faster than population. Starvation is caused by inequality and distribution failures—not food shortages.

But chemical farming is extremely profitable—so the paradigm remains.

We must shift the paradigm so the focus is on feeding our gut brain—the intelligent control system that regulates appetite, immunity, and health.

Paradigms are hard to shift. But if you want to see how, read the plan.