ARC's philosophy broadcast to millions on Songs of Praise

	"Being in the natural world is vital to me because I don't get that sense of wonder and awe anywhere else," Mary Colwell.

ARC's secretary general Martin Palmer and our Catholic consultant, the award-winning nature broadcaster Mary Colwell, were both featured on this weekend's environmentally themed Songs of Praise. The broadcast can be seen on the BBC iPlayer until Sunday September 6.

"If God created everything... then what is our relationship with it?" Martin Palmer asks, showing how the writer of Genesis in the Bible was reacting to previous Babylonian stories in which humans were just puppets. It liberated human beings from being playthings of the gods and it gave us power. But now there is time for a new story, in which we do not think that we have dominion."

"Being in the natural world is vital to me because I don't get that sense of wonder and awe anywhere else," Mary Colwell says. Not in a building or even inside a church. When you go round the world filming you come across many little moments that mean a lot and some of them are in exotic spaces... but there is a beautiful spectacle that happens right here. You can have a million starlings over the Somerset levels every winter gathering together, swirling around in these wonderful patterns and I think I'm speechless with the beauty of what I've just seen."

I don't understand why the natural world is so full of suffering - that's a very human term - but I do know that that is an important part of it, and that there is something about suffering that is very important in the Christian message."

	Songs of Praise is a flagship programme for the BBC's religions department, regularly attracting some three million viewers.

The interviews were recorded in Bristol - one of them in the beautiful urban garden at the Catholic Emmaus House retreat centre in Clifton, which was recently featured in ARC's eco-retreat newsletter.

Songs of Praise is a flagship programme for the BBC's religions department, regularly attracting some three million viewers.