John Muir: The Scotsman Who Saved America’s Wild Places, Mary Colwell

One of the first things you learn about John Muir is of his remarkable life in the wilderness of America; his life’s work of making the country fall in love with its land and resulting in the formation of many of its national parks. However, equally fascinating, is his journey to that point — John Muir: The Scotsman Who Saved America’s Wild Places by Mary Colwell tells that story.

The son of a harsh disciplinarian, John Muir spent his childhood working from dawn until dusk on the family farm and when eventually gifted a moment of freedom, he used this in the most astonishing way. Not every waking hour, but those hours in which almost any other person would choose to rest after gruelling, laborious days, were spent in the cellar making machines. Locks and water wheels, a feeding machine for the horses, and perhaps most famously, an ‘early rising machine’, a clock which could tell the day of the week and day of the month along with rising up to tip the sleeper out of bed in the morning.

John Muir’s understanding and fascination with the links between science and nature, built upon on a deeply religious foundation, spin together like the cogs in his cellar inventions to build the man the world now knows as the Father of the National Parks.

Mary Colwell is an award-winning TV, radio and internet producer, who makes programmes for the BBC Natural History Unit and the independent sector, mainly on nature and the environment. She is also a feature writer for The Tablet. In January 2020, Colwell established a Curlew Action, a new charity supporting the work on Curlew conservation as well as promoting natural history education from primary through to university level.