On Being with Krista Tippett

Trained as a musician, acoustic biologist Katy Payne was first to discover that humpback whales compose ever-changing songs to communicate, and first to understand that elephants communicate with one another across long distances by infrasound. We hear what she has learned about life in this world from two of its largest and most mysterious creatures.

Katy Payne is an acoustic biologist and founder of the Elephant Listening Project at Cornell University. Krista spoke with her on January 9, 2007, from the studios of American Public Media in St. Paul, Minnesota. She was in a private recording studio in Ithaca, New York. This interview is included in our program "Whale Songs and Elephant Loves." Download an mp3 of the produced show at onbeing.org.

Our Civil Conversations Project continues with the Ghanaian-British-American philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. His parents' marriage helped inspire the movie Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. He's studied ethics in a world of strangers and how unimaginable social change happens. We explore his erudite yet down-to-earth take on disarming moral hostilities in America now.

This unedited interview with Kwame Anthony Appiah was recorded in 2011 and is included in our show, "Sidling Up to Difference." Download the mp3 of the produced show at onbeing.org.

Joanna Macy is a Buddhist philosopher of ecology and an exquisite translator of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. We take that poetry as a lens on her wisdom, at 81, about the great dramas of our time: ecological, political, and personal. Rilke sought the shape of meaning in a now-vanished central Europe at the turn of the last century. Joanna Macy's vision took shape in crucibles of the 20th century; she sees us at a pivotal moment in history -- with possibilities of unraveling, or of creating a life-sustaining human society.

Four Jesuits in history have had asteroids named after them. Our guests are the two living astronomers with that distinction. Brother Guy Consolmagno and Father George Coyne study the composition of meteorites and the life and death of stars. They share their observations of life, faith, friendship, and the universe from their seats in the Vatican Observatory.

Yoga has infiltrated law schools and strip malls, churches and hospitals. This 5,000-year-old spiritual technology is converging with 21st-century medical science and with many religious and philosophical perspectives. Seane Corn is a renowned yoga teacher and the founder of "Off the Mat, Into the World." She takes us inside the practicalities and power of yoga - even as a source of social healing.

This unedited interview with Seane Corn was recorded in 2011 and is included in our show, "Yoga. Meditation in Action." Download the mp3 of the produced show at onbeing.org.

Civil rights veteran Vincent Harding has a long lens of wisdom on contemporary divisions and confusions. He says America is still a developing nation when it comes to democratic encounter across real difference. But he finds hope in the young people he's been bringing into creative contact with civil rights elders for decades. They are his answer to the question that drives him: Is America possible?

This unedited interview with Vincent Harding was recorded in 2011 and is included in our show, "Civility, History, and Hope." Download the mp3 of the produced show at onbeing.org.

A Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Wangari Maathai founded a grassroots organization that empowers African women to improve their lives and conserve the environment through planting trees. She speaks about the global balance of human and natural resources, and shares her thoughts on where God resides.

This unedited interview with Wangari Maathai was recorded in 2006 and is included in our show, "Planting the Future." Download the mp3 of the produced show at onbeing.org.

With anthropologist Scott Atran, we make deeper sense of the human dynamics in the Middle East and North Africa. Atran offers bracing context on the promise of this moment and the response it asks from the watching world.

This unedited interview with Scott Atran was recorded in 2011 and is included in our show, "Demonstations, Hopes, and Dreams." Download the mp3 of the produced show at onbeing.org.

Naturalist Terry Tempest Williams sheds light on the American West as a crucible of American divides and possibilities. And she offers up notions of neighborliness, sacred rage, and beauty as a matter of survival.