27-02-2025
Alaska climate refugee champion Robin Bronen driven by a desire to protect humanity
Robin Bronen is driven by her desire to protect humanity.
This ambition steered Bronen to work as an attorney in Alaksa where she started out representing domestic violence victims. Her work with victims of abuse lasted until she decided she wanted a new challenge and joined the Peace Corps.
This new path led her to do agricultural work in Honduras.
As Bronen's time wrapped up in Honduras, her two trainers took her aside and opened the door to a new path. They told her to return to the U.S. and use her legal expertise to help immigrants there.
'They said to me … 'You now understand why people from our country are going to the United States, and we need you to help us there,'' Bronen recalled.
So, when her tenure with the Peace Corps ended, she returned to Alaska to work as an immigration attorney.
She spent 15 years in The Last Frontier working to realize her ambitions to protect people, but this focus shifted when she realized she wanted to address the climate crisis that was affecting her neighbors in Alaska.
Bronen co-founded the Alaska Institute for Justice in 2005 to focus on immigration issues in the state. The nonprofit added language interpretation and climate justice programs to help Alaska Native communities navigate mounting concerns in those areas.
Bronen announced her retirement as Alaska Institute for Justice executive director in September.
Her previous law degree wasn't going to be enough, so Bronen rededicated herself to graduate school to better understand climate science.
'I wanted to understand it myself, given what I was witnessing in Alaksa,' Bronen said.
The term 'climate refugees' was gaining popularity at the time, and Bronen was able to find the intersection of her immigration background with her new pursuit: working with Alaska Native Indigenous communities affected by the climate crisis.
It was my grandmother who fled Ukraine back in the early 1900s because she was Jewish, and so she and her family survived the pogroms. So, I grew up in this belief in needing to protect humanity from the ways that we can be unkind and unjust to each other, because she always believed in the goodness of people in spite of what she had lived through.
Honestly, our work is all about the people we serve and the communities we serve, and so my proudest moments are when we're able to serve people in the ways that protect their human rights and make justice happen for them as individuals or communities.
So, in the immigration realm, the first person I ever represented who was seeking asylum in the United States was a Russian-Jewish man who had been sent to Siberia, and I was able to represent him and get him political asylum in the United States. I felt like I was paying back my ancestors who were not able to stay where they were born.
To stand beside people who have been treated unjustly by our political, legal system and standing with them as an ally to help them get the resources or justice they deserve in the face of whatever opposition comes toward us.
I just found a quote by Cornell West that's all about love: 'Justice is what love looks like in public.' So that is my mantra.
I look up to the people and communities we serve. So right now, I am working mostly with Alaska Native Indigenous communities, and I look up to them for the wisdom and courage to keep having hope and faith that we will be able to withstand whatever the climate crisis is going to manifest in the places that we love and live.
I'm an avid runner, so I go running every day — pretty much six miles a day — to clear out that energy when I am confronted with challenges in doing the advocacy that we've done. Running is an incredibly creative process, so ideas always come to me of new angles to use to deal with whatever is presented as the challenge of the moment.
Some advice I wish somebody older than me had given me is that justice requires persistence and to be really creative in the strategies I use to advocate for the people in communities I serve. Change has not happened over the course of the decades I've been doing this work. That persistence and courage to keep advocating for those who need to have a voice beside them so their human rights are protected and they get the justice they deserve.
IndyStar's environmental reporting project is made possible through the generous support of the nonprofit Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Climate refugee champion Robin Bronen is Alaska's Women of the Year honoree
