I have spent the last week developing a mini-lesson for my sustainability course, a type of assignment that sneaks up on you and suddenly takes over your thoughts. The assignment was simple: teach the class something about climate change/sustainability that relates to your interests. But the moment I started brainstorming ideas, I found myself entering a strange, unseen world of data centers, the unseen giants that govern every search, stream, and AI question we so casually ask into the void.

And once you start seeing them, you can’t really unsee them.

Creating a 10-minute lesson about this topic felt a bit like attempting to teach someone about the wind: invisible, everywhere, and easy to ignore until the moment you can’t ignore it anymore. I focused on making the lesson interactive, guessing games, self-reflection, and a choose-your-own-path simulation where every choice has trade-offs. There are no right answers, only the messy reality of environmental decision-making. And somehow, in the middle of all this, I realized the relevance of the task.

In the midst of all this, I started to find humor in the peculiarity of teaching something that cannot be physically represented. You cannot hold a data center in your hand, and you cannot pass around a container of “invisible water use” for students to examine. So, the act of teaching becomes a series of metaphors, anecdotes, and small epiphanies, like the ones that occur when a person suddenly understands that their nightly Netflix binge or their daily AI inquiry has a physical representation. These small epiphanies are almost satisfying, like watching a Polaroid develop before your very eyes. It’s a reminder that, often, the act of teaching sustainability is not about providing answers, but about making people aware of what they have been living beside all this time.

It’s the same kind of work we do at The Symbiosis Foundation.

A great deal of our job is about helping people notice what they’ve been living beside without really seeing it; the dynamic in a partnership, the unspoken in a community, the ways in which a project impacts those not in the room. A surprising amount of our time is about helping people find ways to put the invisible into words: making disparate concerns into a narrative whole, bringing tensions to the surface before they become issues, and helping people find the words to describe what they’ve been sensing but couldn’t quite put their finger on. It’s painstaking work, but it’s also where trust is built. 

What makes it interesting is what comes next after something new and unseen at last comes into view. Once a tension is named and a pattern recognized, people often need help to make sense of it, to understand what it means and what to do with it, and to find a way to move forward with it without losing steam and trust. That’s where our role changes from simply unveiling the invisible to helping people through it. At times, this may involve clarifying what seems to be an overwhelming situation; at other times, it may involve redefining what seems to be an unworkable concern to one that feels more doable rather than debilitating; and at other times, it may simply involve waiting with people until a way forward seems to emerge. Whether the issue at hand is climate change or a new relationship, the critical role is to help people through this period of discovery and understanding and to turn understanding into direction rather than confusion.

This mini-lesson reminded me that the key to communication isn’t about dazzling people with information, but about opening a window: helping people see what was always there, just outside of their line of sight, and equipping them with the tools to respond intentionally.