Through the Noise with J. Renay

Shawna Wakefield on Practicing Freedom

What does it actually take to stay in the work of changing systems — not for a season, but for a life? Shawna Wakefield has spent twenty-five years building frameworks for transformative feminist leadership at Oxfam, Gender at Work, and the UN. She is also a practitioner of somatics, meditation, and embodied leadership — a woman who learned, long before she had language for it, that the body holds knowledge the thinking mind cannot reach on its own. She is a mother who lost a child in Cambodia. A Black and mixed-race kid who moved from New York City to rural Vermont in fourth grade and met "othering" before she had a word for it. A daughter of Alan and Pat Wakefield who now meditates with her ancestors every morning. In this conversation, Renay and Shawna sit with what it actually takes to stay in justice work over the long haul — not as career, but as life. They talk about Afghanistan after September 11, Cambodia after profound loss, and the turning point when Shawna realized that being well in her own body was the prerequisite to staying in the work. They talk about the difference between guilt and responsibility, and why guilt is not a good motivation. They talk about what changes when a leader stops trying to lead from the neck up.

Leonard Robinson on the Discipline of Not Fitting In

How do you stay true to your convictions when they set you apart? Renay sits down with Leonard E. Robinson — over forty-five years in environmental management, appointee under four California governors, former Acting Director and Chief Deputy Director of California's Department of Toxic Substances Control, Partner and Chief Sustainability Strategist at SEMCO, Sustainability Coordinator for the Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta, and host of the Faith and Sustainability podcast — for a conversation about what it takes to lead from faith inside institutions that were not built to hear it. This is the second conversation Renay and Leonard recorded for the show. The first was, in Renay's own words, the conversation any host could have had. So she asked him for another one. What you hear in this episode is a man who stopped trying to fit in a long time ago, walking us through the inner architecture that let him do that — and what it cost, and what it gave him.  This episode is not a sermon. It is not a debate about whether faith belongs in business. It is a working leader — an engineer by training — describing the discipline of following something he cannot prove. And the difference, as he draws it, between faith and resilience: "Resilience is how we react to things. Faith is how we respond to things." Leonard and Renay cover: why language like climate change and faith triggers the same defensive posture, and what to do with that noise instead of around it; the silos we build between profession and belief, and what happens when we stop maintaining them; the difference between confidence and faith for leaders who don't subscribe to a higher authority; Laudato Si' and what it has unlocked inside the Archdiocese of Atlanta; and the leaders Leonard watched cut through — from Greta Thunberg to Charles Lee, the EPA veteran who helped launch the environmental justice movement alongside Dr. Ben Chavis Jr. and whose name most people in this work still don't know. This episode is also a tribute. Leonard passed away after recording. He gave us this conversation. We are honored to share it.

Larry Confino on Positive Stubbornness

What if telling positive stories — at a moment when negativity sells — is its own act of resistance? Renay sits down with Larry Confino — independent documentary director, producer, and the filmmaker behind 50 States of Sustainability, currently airing nationally on PBS in its second season — for a conversation about what it takes to spend twenty-plus years pointing a camera at people who don't make headlines. Larry has been an independent filmmaker for over twenty-five years. He has made feature documentaries about a lost Sephardic Jewish community in Greece and a legendary East Village nightclub. He has done client work for HBO, PBS, Disney, and Canon. But the project that drives him now is one he built from scratch during the pandemic: a documentary series traveling state by state, sitting with engineers, miners, tribal leaders, farmers, and CEOs working on some piece of the climate puzzle from where they stand. He calls it a personal search for optimism. He has filmed in more than twenty states. This conversation is not about climate solutions. It is about what a storyteller does when the attention economy is built to reward what scares us — and how Larry made the deliberate, costly choice to tell stories that don't sell. He calls the inner capacity he keeps finding in the people he interviews "positive stubbornness" — the willingness to keep going at a problem too big for any one person to solve, because the alternative is to give up.  They cover the West Virginia coal miners Larry refuses to villainize, and what it costs to hold reverence for hard-working people while telling a renewable-energy story. The Chippewa engineer in northern Minnesota who is replacing energy poverty with energy sovereignty by building solar on Red Lake Nation. The deep geothermal technology that could cut global emissions by twenty-five percent if its engineers can perfect it. And why Larry believes the people doing this work are not driven by obligation but by something stranger and more durable — the intellectual challenge of refusing to give up. Larry's measure of this work isn't audience size. It is the woman who watched a clip at a community screening, walked up to him, and told him she was changing jobs. This is a conversation about narrative as a tool, collaboration over extraction, and what hope looks like when you treat it as a discipline.

David Biello on Why the Planet Doesn't Need Saving

What if the planet doesn't need saving — and we do? Renay sits down with David Biello — TED's science curator, longtime Scientific American editor, and author of The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth's Newest Age — for a conversation that quietly dismantles almost everything we assume the climate conversation is about. David has been on the environment and energy beat since 1999 — long enough, in his words, to be cynical but not long enough to be depressed. He'll tell you the planet doesn't need saving. We do. Our cities, our food systems, the entire architecture of a life built for a climate that no longer exists — that's what's at stake. And what stands between us and a livable future isn't a missing technology. It's a way of thinking. This conversation is not a tour of climate solutions. It is about attention — what David chooses to notice, what he refuses to, and how he keeps his footing in a world where every message is weaponized and every source needs a second look. The throughline is short-term thinking: the quarterly result, the daily metric, the next outrage in the feed. David names it as the one thing he wishes leaders would unlearn — the same answer Andrew Winston gave in our first episode, arrived at from a completely different room. They cover why David cuts through the noise not with a system but with a network. Why the last 10,000 years of climate stability are the narrow band that all of human civilization was built inside, and what it means that we've already stepped out of it. And why "check the sources" applies hardest to the things you already believe. This is a conversation about responsibility, the long view, and what it takes to keep noticing the world while you're trying to change it.

Dr. Ben F. Chavis, Jr. on Making Time Serve the Movement

What does it take to sustain leadership across decades of struggle? Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr. has been a political prisoner, a denominational executive, the CEO of the NAACP, a Nation of Islam minister, co-founder of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, president and CEO of the Black Press of America, and host of The Chavis Chronicles on PBS. He coined the term environmental racism — from a jail cell — at a time when neither the civil rights movement nor the environmental movement had language for what they were both circling. This conversation is not about the highlight reel. It is about what it costs to hold moral clarity across six decades of struggle, reinvention, and contradiction — and what this moment is still asking of him. Dr. Chavis reflects on what has remained constant through every organization, ideology, and storm he has weathered: a commitment to freedom, justice, and equality for all people. He shares how faith carried him through a 34-year prison sentence as one of the Wilmington Ten, how he learned to transform contradiction into fuel rather than paralysis, and why the current moment demands intergenerational organizing rather than overwhelm. They cover why preparation — not just skills or capacity — is what carries leaders through a polycrisis. How a jail cell became the birthplace of a paradigm-shifting concept. What the African liberation movements of the 1970s reveal about the same extractive forces driving environmental and economic injustice today. And why truth cannot simply coexist next to falsehood — it has to remove it from the dialogue. At a moment when the historical record is being actively narrowed, Dr. Chavis is a reminder of what it looks like to stay in the work — not despite the noise, but through it.