Homesteading Principal sounds like a perfect solution, but two things:
Firstly, harmony will be difficult because of the natural laws that dictate human behavior in large groups. There will be people that break the rules. I am not making a judgement here on the inherent goodness or badness of humankind. As Animals, some percentage of the population always deviates from the norm. Diversity and hence ability to adapt is lost if one strategy displaces all others.
Secondly, I'm not so sure its such a responsible idea to give people the right to assume ownership of any unclaimed resource. Ecosystems are encroached on enough already. Do we want a free for all?
I do like the idea though, and the sentiment, thanks for posting.
Yeah, lots of people litter, and are gross-- leaving messes behind them, and disrespecting nature in many other ways. However, the real issues are not the every day people... and when it is the every day people, one could argue it's the govt. run schools producing much of the behavior we see. The people have been programmed to do what benefits the power structure.
Govt has perpetuated a lot of lies to make us beLIEve we need them. I used think they probably prevented things from being worse when it came to the environment... but they are overwhelmingly the ones destroying it.
Mass extinctions of the worlds megafauna coincides with the arrival of man to a new land. In Australia, shortly after government-less humans arrived 65,000 years ago roughly, the larger animals went extinct and the country underwent massive deforestation. Possibly a coincidence, but the same thing happened again in North and South America, when they were colonized for the first time approx. 40,000 years later.
Agriculture, which began about 12,000 years or so, further encroached, by displacing natural diversity with huge areas of mono-culture. Animals that were useful were bred in huge numbers, animals that were not, were pushed into smaller and smaller pockets of untouched wilderness.
The counter culture loves to blame government and big industry for today's problems. But rather than using effort to find scapegoats (usually the leadership), would it not be better spent on trying to understand human nature in more depth. Or encouraging collaboration. Blaming the people with the power to change is not going to win them over.