Quito Tsui came to Stanford to think through one of the trickiest tensions in sustainability work: how the digital tools we use to address environmental destruction may also be implicated in it.
A first-year PhD student working with Professor David Cohen, founding director of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Stanford, and Xavier Basurto, professor of Environmental Social Sciences, Tsui studies sustainable development after conflict with a focus on justice, technology, and the environment.
At the recent “Preferred Futures: Climate and Environmental Justice Across Borders” conference organized by the Center for Just Environmental Futures, Tsui delivered a lightning talk discussing how big tech’s climate tools can cause harm.
“I think that the tech piece is one that often we kind of let go,” Tsui said. “We’re paying a lot more attention now to communities and working with people and power dynamics, and that is brilliant and absolutely necessary – and we might undo loads of that work by not scrutinizing our technological choices.”
Tsui was inspired to participate in the conference after taking a winter quarter class with Maxine Burkett, the Emerson Collective Professor in Climate, Environment, and Society at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. Burkett is the founding faculty director of the Center for Just Environmental Futures, which launched in January 2026. The center is “an important waypoint for how we think about environmental justice and how the campus is discussing it,” Tsui said.
“I love the idea of not just thinking about the way that our imaginations are limited by the here and now, but also trying to push toward the future,” Tsui said.