Living in the Southwest and then in the Northwest, Gardner studied with the Hopi, Apache, and Coast Salish Indians, learning herbal, shamanic and sound healing. This she combined with her own ancestral Hebraic and middle Eastern traditions as the daughter of a precognitive mother and the granddaughter of a rabbi/cantor.

Starting her healing career as an herbalist, Gardner was educated in the field, living in a rural commune with 80 people on 200 acres of land. Her fellow communards provided the laboratory for one of the first contemporary experiments in holistic healing in 1966. From there, Joy worked at the Country Doctor Community Clinic in Seattle, where they published her first book, Healing Yourself, which has sold over 100,000 copies.

She also helped start the Siuslaw Rural Health Clinic between Florence and Eugene, Oregon, where she worked as an Alternative Practitioner. Later Gardner trained with death-and-loss pioneer Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, and helped start a hospice in Nelson, B.C., Canada, where she trained volunteers.

Her close relationship with nature gave rise to an intimate sense of communication with rocks and crystals, which led to the creation of her own unique method of healing, which she calls Vibrational Alignmentª

Virato converses with Alan Weisman. senior editor and radio producer for Homelands Productions. His reports, set in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Central and South America, the Caribbean, Antarctica, Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle and Far East, have appeared in Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Orion, Audubon, Mother Jones, Discover, Condé Nast Traveler, Resurgence, and in several anthologies including The Best American Science Writing 2006, and have been heard on National Public Radio, Public Radio International, and American Public Media.

He is the author of An Echo In My Blood (Harcourt Brace, Inc., 1999); Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World (Chelsea Green Publishing, 1998); La Frontera: The United States Border With Mexico (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986); and We, Immortals (Pocket Books, 1979). and his latest, The World Without Us (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2007), the subject of today's conversation.

Dr. Weisman is Laureate Associate Professor in Journalism and Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona, where he leads an annual field program in international journalism.

Weisman has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Colombia, writer-in-residence at the Altos de Chavón Escuela de Arte y Diseño in the Dominican Republic, the John Farrar Fellow in Nonfiction at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times Magazine.

Among his radio awards shared with his Homelands colleagues are a Robert F. Kennedy Citation, the Harry Chapin/World Hunger Year award, and Brazil's Prèmio Nacional de Jornalismo Radiofônico. He has also received a Four Corners Award for Best Nonfiction Book; a Los Angeles Press Club Award for Best Feature Story; and a Best of the West Award in Journalism. His book, Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World, won the 1998 Social Inventions Award from the London-based Global Ideas Bank. He and his wife, sculptor Beckie Kravetz, live in western Massachusetts.

Zukav is a graduate of Harvard and a former U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Beret) officer in Vietnam. After he began doing shows with Oprah Winfrey, The Seat of the Soul became a #1 New York Times bestseller and remained on the New York Times bestseller list fort three years

Zukav's gentle humor, sensitivity, and deep insights have endeared him to millions of readers and listeners. His spiritual partner is Linda Francis. They lecture internationally, and through Genesis: The Foundation for the Universal Human, they offer retreats, programs, and other events supporting the experience of spiritual partnership. They live in northern California.

In his words, "My life has been an unfolding vision of a planet without conflict, a world that reflects the values of the soul – harmony, cooperation, sharing, and reverence for Life – and that is filled with universal humans, humans who are citizens of the Universe, whose allegiance is to life. The more pain I see in the world, the more I see how it can be used to find and transform the parts of ourselves that are creating so violently and destructively into parts that create consciously and constructively. I see the potential for a new world being born in front of me and all around me, and I feel the only way to bring that potential into being is to know myself, and where necessary, change myself, to create authentic power, to align personality with soul, and I love sharing what I know about how to do that."

Jones has been featured on Good Morning America, 20/20, 60 Minutes, in countless publications including The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, and in countless other media. He has been called, "an absolutely riveting television presence," by Patrick Beech of the Austin-American Statesman.

Jones is also the producer of numerous DVDs on the 9/11 cover-up, considered the most popular.

He is currently the host of a radio show on the Genesis Network and is now heard by millions.

Today, Virato speaks with Graham Hancock,  author of the international bestsellers The Sign and The Seal, Fingerprints of the Gods and Heaven's Mirror. His books have sold more than five million copies worldwide and have been translated into 27 languages. His public lectures and TV appearances have put his ideas before audiences of tens of millions. He has become recognized as an unconventional thinker who raises legitimate questions about humanity's history and prehistory and offers an increasingly popular challenge to the entrenched views of orthodox scholars.

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Hancock's early years were spent in India, where his father worked as a surgeon. Later he went to school and university in the northern English city of Durham and graduated from Durham University in 1973 with First Class Honors in Sociology. He went on to pursue a career in quality journalism, writing for many of Britain's leading newspapers including The Times, The Sunday Times, The Independent, and The Guardian. He was co-editor of New Internationalist magazine from 1976-1979 and East Africa correspondent of The Economist from 1981-1983.

In the early 1980's Hancock's writing began to move consistently in the direction of books. His first book (Journey Through Pakistan, with photographers Mohamed Amin and Duncan Willetts) was published in 1981. It was followed by Under Ethiopian Skies (1983), Ethiopia: The Challenge of Hunger (1984), and AIDS: The Deadly Epidemic (1986). In 1987 Hancock began work on his widely-acclaimed critique of foreign aid, Lords of Poverty, which was published in 1989. African Ark (with photographers Angela Fisher and Carol Beckwith) was published in 1990.

In 2002 Hancock published Underworld: Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age to great critical acclaim, and hosted the accompanying British TV series. This was the culmination of years of research and on-hand dives at ancient underwater ruins. Arguing that many of the clues to the origin of civilization lay underwater, on coastal regions once above water but flooded at the end of the last Ice age, Underworld offered tangible archaeological evidence that myths and legends of ancient floods were not to be dismissed out of hand.

The subject of today's chat will be his latest book, Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind.