Our classic humanist ethics requires that all duties attach to an individual “self,” a valuable entity with rights and duties of its own. But nature operates on a different basis: “there are no rights in nature and nature is indifferent to the welfare of particular animals” (Rolston, p. 75). In order to formulate an autonomous environmental ethic, we must therefore be able to move beyond the humanist focus on the self, towards a new source of value and a new type of value. In this essay, I intend to examine the idea of ​​value in nature, drawing particularly on Holmes Rolston III's concept of systemic value and ecosystem ethics and the ground aesthetics of Aldo Leopold (as presented by J. Baird Callicott). There are striking similarities between these two narratives that seem to indicate an ethical/aesthetic consensus that it is the unity, interconnectedness, and interdependence of nature that should be valued. A transcendence of 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 noumena. Rolston's argument has three parts: first, ecosystems are the "fundamental units of survival", second, given that "all value is generated within the geosystemic and ecosystem pyramid", and third, that this value generated is neither instrumental nor intrinsic, but systemic (Rolston, p. 82, 86, 84). We will examine each in part and see how Rolston's argument fits with Leopold's. Leopold and Rolston realize that nature is not isolated; rather, organisms are “nested in a buzzing community of cooperation and competition, a single biota” (Callicott, p. 138). There is "rare", "orchestrated" music in the middle of paper...... The common point of Rolston's systemic ethics and Leopold's earthly aesthetics is clear: humans must respond to nature at the ecosystem level and not just at the individual organism level or even at the species level. This is not always easy since the ecological interconnections of nature are not readily apparent to the human senses. It is possible to attack ecosystem ethics from Evernden's view that nature is a miracle: what is important is not our faith in "abstractions" (ecosystems), but our sensory experience of particular (frogs) (Evernden, p. 198). Yet there is something compelling and instinctive just about focusing on how it all fits together, and Rolston seems to be right when he insists that "no environmental ethic found its way on Earth until it found an ethic for the biotic communities in which all destinies are established.” are intertwined (Rolston, p.81).