Our classical humanist ethics requires that all duties be tied to an individual “self,” a valued entity with its own rights and duties. But nature operates on a different basis: “there are no rights in nature, and nature is indifferent to the well-being of particular animals” (Rolston, p.75). To formulate an autonomous environmental ethic, therefore, we must be able to move beyond the humanist focus on the self, towards a new source of value and a new kind of value. In this essay I intend to examine the idea of ​​value in nature, drawing in particular on Holmes Rolston III's concept of systemic value and ecosystem ethics and Aldo Leopold's earth aesthetics (presented by J. Baird Callicott). There are striking similarities between these two accounts which seem to indicate an ethical/aesthetic consensus that it is the unity, interconnection and interdependence of nature that is valued. A movement beyond the “self” is a movement towards the system, the biotic community. However, I also want to examine the potential challenges posed to the idea of ​​ecosystem ethics by Leopold's noumenon. Rolston's argument has three parts: first, that ecosystems are "the fundamental units of survival", second, given this, "all value is generated within the geosystemic and ecosystem pyramid", and third, that this generated value is neither instrumental nor intrinsic, but systemic (Rolston, pp. 82, 86, 84). We will examine each of these in part and see how Rolston's argument fits with Leopold Sia's Leopold and Rolston realize that nature is not isolated; rather organisms are “interconnected in a buzzing community of cooperation and competition, a biota” (Callicott, p.138). " at... middle of paper... crucial point of Rolston's systemic ethics and Leopold's earth aesthetics is clear: humans must respond to nature at the level of the ecosystem and not just at the level of the individual organism or even at the species level. This is not always easy since the ecological interconnections of nature are not immediately apparent to the human senses. It is possible to attack ecosystem ethics from the point of view of nature as Evernden's miracle: what is important is not our belief in “abstractions” (ecosystems), but our sensory experience of particulars (frogs) (Evernden, p. 198). However, there is something compelling and instinctively right about focusing on how it all fits together, and Rolston seems to be right when he argues that “no environmental ethic has found its way to Earth until it finds an ethic for the biotic communities in which all destinies are intertwined (Rolston, p.81).