| Sumario: | This article demonstrates how aesthetic emotions, such as wonder, awe, grief, and enchantment, transform into practical judgments that guide care and politics in threatened landscapes. Drawing on multiyear ethnographic research conducted at two sites that we place "in dialogue" rather than in strict comparison—the rapidly warming Alps (France, Italy, and Switzerland) and a conservation complex at Empire Ranch in Arizona—we demonstrate how invocations of beauty and ugliness render ecological change tangible and morally significant. In the Alps, mountaineers, guides, and glaciologists observe the "darkening" and retreat of ice, reworking their attachments as they learn to recognize—or reject—new forms of beauty. In Arizona, volunteers, scientists, and neighboring communities actively promote beauty through restoration practices, where scientific metrics and often unspoken aesthetics quietly coproduce decisions about species, histories, and futures. In both locations, aesthetic judgments are not epiphenomenal; they are situated social practices that authorize certain feelings, mute others, and establish particular orders of care. By foregrounding ordinary conversations about beauty, we contribute to anthropologies of the environment, affect, and aesthetics, showing how people experience ecological crises through sensory value, how loss is apprehended and negotiated through aesthetic judgment, and how these values become claims about what must endure.
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