I speak of ethos as it relates to a piece of earth. I have known of this for many years but today decided to do a short netsearch... Here is a good description:
Heidegger, in his "Letter on Humanism" (1947), draws attention to the Greek words êthikos and êthos in order to mark the difference between the discrete discipline typical of Platonic philosophy (i.e., êthikos) and what he believes is an ontologically more profound concept found in the thought of the tragedians and presocratic thinkers (i.e., êthos):

Along with "logic" and "physics," "ethics" appeared for the first time in the school of Plato. These disciplines arose at a time when thinking was becoming "philosophy," philosophy, epistêmê (science), and science itself a matter for schools and academic pursuits. In the course of a philosophy so understood, science waxed and thinking waned. Thinkers prior to this period knew neither a "logic" nor an "ethics" nor "physics." Yet their thinking was neither illogical nor immoral. But they did think physis in a depth and breadth that no subsequent "physics" was ever again able to attain. The tragedies of Sophocles--provided such a comparison is at all permissible--preserve the êthos in their sagas more primordially than Aristotle's lectures on "ethics." A saying of Heraclitus which consists of only three words says something so simply that from it the essence of the êthos immediately comes to light.[15] (232-33)

Heidegger's reference, here, is to Heraclitus fragment 119: êthos anthrôpôi daimôn. Typically, this fragment is translated with êthos rendered as "character," as we find in Kathleen Freeman's Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: "Character for man is destiny."[16] Heidegger, however, objects that such a rendering of êthos is not at all Greek but, instead, a modern projection onto ancient thought. The ancient meaning of êthos, Heidegger insists, is "abode," or "dwelling place."[17] He continues, "The word names the open region in which man dwells. The open region of his abode allows what pertains to man's essence, and what in thus arriving resides in nearness to him, to appear. The abode of man contains and preserves the advent of what belongs to man in his essence" (233).

I am not interested, here, in the ontological thesis that Heidegger attempts to support with etymological arguments. His observations, however, do point toward a fascinating semantic field in which "ethics" is linked to a relationship between one's existence and places of habitation, a relationship designated by the Greek word êthos. In its earliest usage, êthos refers to the haunts or abodes of animals, as we find, for example, in a passage from the Iliad where Homer compares Paris with a stalled horse who, breaking free of his rope, "gallops over the plain in thunder to his accustomed bathing place in a sweet-running river and in the pride of his strength holds high his head, and the mane floats over his shoulders; sure of his glorious strength,the quick knees carry him to the loved places and the pasuture of horses [êthea kai nomon hippôn]."[18]Ethos, in this older usage, is not so much the expression of character, or identity; instead, it is a revelation, or manifesting of character in a place of habitation. And by the time of Hesiod, the word's reference is extended to human habitation.

A modern idea similar to the ancient concept of êthos appears in the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. I characterize Levinas's work as an "ethical philosophy" because he argues for the priority of ethical thought in philosophy, a project he refers to as "ethics as first philosophy." In his most expository book, Totalité et Infini (1961), Levinas treats "habitation" as the very condition of contemplation, which he posits as the core of human subjectivity: "the subject contemplating the world presupposes the event of dwelling, the withdrawl from the elements (that is, from immediate enjoyment, already uneasy about the morrow), recollection in the intimacy of the home."[19] Moreover, Levinas reasons, this "intimacy of the home" presupposes an intimacy with someone, with an other: "The intimacy which familiarity already presupposes is an intimacy with someone. The interiority of recollection is a solitude in a world already human. Recollection refers to a welcome" (155). And this welcoming other, Levinas claims, has the special character of "femine alterity": "The woman is the condition for recollection, the interiority of the Home, and inhabitation" (155).