Both Ruskin and Dickens advocate for communities of care with women as powerful agents of relational ethics, and both describe horrifying environmental degradation. Examining Ruskin’s 1860s writing on gender, environmental disaster, and political economy such as Munera Pulveris (1862, 1863), “Of Queens’ Gardens” (1865), The Ethics of the Dust (1865), and Time and Tide (1867) alongside Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864–65) reminds us that including women is central not only to finding solutions to social, economic, and ecological puzzles but also to creating a community of care that crosses boundaries between human and nonhuman. For Ruskin, the earth is a living thing and “the links between dead matter and animation drift everywhere unseen” (19:362). Although Ruskin is widely recognized for the importance of his thought for environmentalism, rarely noted is that Ruskin concentrates on gender as part of his attention to the environmental crisis he documents, deplores, and to which he develops a material response. Indeed, gender is often left out of discussions of Victorian-era ecological damage and response as irrelevant. We risk losing ground in the great strides Victorian studies spearheaded in gender investigations if in the rush to rectify our ignorance about climate change we forget intersectional imperatives.