Rooted Futures Lab addresses the intertwined crises of climate collapse, extractive technologies, and social inequity by reimagining how technology is designed and governed. We build the human, conceptual, and technical infrastructure for a just tech future, training early-career technologists through our Environmental Justice in Tech Fellowship, developing public tools like the National Data Center Impact Dashboard, and equipping communities with data storytelling programs like Mapping Your Local Environment. Together, these efforts shift who holds power in innovation and how progress is defined.

Rooted Futures Lab emerged from a shared realization that we are trapped in a cycle of reacting to harmful technologies instead of building alternatives. While working across climate, data, and environmental justice spaces, our team saw how even well-intentioned innovations often reproduce the same extractive patterns they aim to solve. We wanted to break that loop and imagine what it would look like if environmental justice and care were not retrofits to how we think about and deploy technology, but its starting condition.

Our biggest challenge is cultural, not technical: expanding the public imagination of what technology can be for. Many institutions still treat environmental justice as an optional “add-on” rather than the foundation of innovation. We’re working to shift that mindset, showing that environmental justice-centered design isn’t a constraint but a catalyst for truly transformative climate and technology solutions. It takes time, translation, and persistence to make that worldview mainstream, but it’s a change our future depends on.

We draw inspiration from leaders like Dr. Ruha Benjamin and Dr. Timnit Gebru, whose work exposes the social and ecological costs of technology; from environmental justice leaders like WE ACT and Rise St. James, who model community-driven power; from science fiction writers who have the courage to build new worlds like Octavia Butler; and from movements for appropriate technology and climate justice that remind us progress must be relational, not extractive. Their example informs how we build tools and train technologists to center care and accountability.

The people who embody Rooted Futures Lab are those reimagining what technology can be for. They’re students questioning extractive systems in their classrooms, organizers using data to defend their neighborhoods, and engineers learning to build with, not for, communities. They carry both technical skill and moral imagination, believing that innovation should repair rather than harm. Our work is about nurturing those turning frustration with the status quo into blueprints for more just, interdependent futures.