Lake District & Cumbria Nature Nonprofits

The Lake District is where the English learned to find mountains beautiful rather than merely inconvenient. Wordsworth and the Romantics turned a hard sheep-farming country of glacial valleys and ribbon lakes into the birthplace of a whole way of seeing landscape, and out of that came, in a fairly direct line, the National Trust and the national parks movement worldwide.

The fells look wild and are, in ecological terms, quite heavily grazed, close-cropped by sheep in a farming tradition that is central to local identity and that also suppresses the woodland and scrub that would otherwise clothe the valleys. The debate over rewilding here is unusually raw, because it is not only about ecology but about whether a way of life is a heritage worth keeping.

The organizations here restore the woodland and peat, work to slow the water in a valley system that floods severely and repeatedly, and negotiate the future of the fells with farming communities. It is a small landscape carrying an outsized share of the national conversation.