Environmental ethics emerged from the thickets of applied philosophy in the early 1970s as a rebuke to anthropocentrism, the  human- centered outlook embedded within the Western ethical system. The anthropocentric worldview was singled out by the first generation of environmental philosophers for its failure to extend the boundaries of moral considerability and the attribution of intrinsic  value to non humans (including animals and plants) and to larger ecological communities. These new non-anthropocentric philosophers argued that the mainstream ethical traditions of the  West—for example, Kantian ethics, utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and so  forth—were not only insufficient as foundations for a new environmental ethic but also philosophically hostile to developing a more respectful relationship to nature. The conventional ethical theories, they argued, only considered human interests and harms worth recognizing. Nature itself was accorded only instrumental value; it was not deemed worthy of direct moral concern.