土地伦理是环境伦理的视角之一，是由奥尔多·利奥波德（Aldo Leopold）在他的《沙乡年鉴》（A Sand Country Almanac）一书中首次倡导的。其中他写道，需要一种“新的伦理”，“一种处理人与土地，以及人与在土地上生长的动物和植物之间的伦理观”。

在他那个时代，美国林业局（USFS）的主流观念从创立者吉福德·平肖（Gifford Pinchot）开始，就是追求经济利益的和功利主义的，而利奥波德则主张一种“生态学 ”的态度（这个词由芝加哥大学的亨利·钱德勒·考尔斯（Henry Chandler Cowles）于20世纪初在对印地安那沙丘的研究中提出，利奥波德是该术语最早的推广者之一）。资源保护主义在更偏向人类中心主义的资源管理范式中获得了它的首要地位，而与此同时，利奥波德的著作和启发与约翰·缪尔一起引发了环境主义的发展。

A land ethic is a philosophy or theoretical framework about how, ethically, humans should regard the land. The term was coined by Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) in his A Sand County Almanac (1949), a classic text of the environmental movement. There he argues that there is a critical need for a "new ethic," an "ethic dealing with human's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it". Leopold offers an ecologically-based land ethic that rejects strictly human-centered views of the environment and focuses on the preservation of healthy, self-renewing ecosystems. A Sand County Almanac was the first systematic presentation of a holistic or ecocentric approach to the environment. Although Leopold is credited with coining the term "land ethic," there are many philosophical theories that speak to how humans should treat the land. Some of the most prominent land ethics include those rooted in economics, utilitarianism, libertarianism, egalitarianism, and ecology.