Eco News

Why is Lighthof needed? - What are the problems?

Lighthof aims to provide high-quality news. High-quality implies that news have an ecological aspect, besides any economical and societal reporting. High-quality news are well investigated, they ask the important questions related to the matter, and they report on the answers in an open, independent, and diverse way.

Only this way, readers can become empowered to create sane opinions and make sane decisions. What's sanity? In Latin it's sapiens, what makes the Homo sapiens ("vernĂĽnftiger Mensch") a human being, as claimed by itself. Being sane, humans can find solutions to global problems such as protecting nature, ecosystems, and human life on Earth, which got endangered because of insane and worsely coordinated human actions. Humans became a natural power being able to substantially shape the Earth. Human traces will be retrievable in the far-future, which is why this era is called Anthropocene. This fact is the reason, why humans are responsible for their actions, decisions, and opinions that lead to decisions and actions.

Humans do have some "weaknesses", for example, their attention is finite. Currently, news providers fight for this attention, and as the record shows, they end up applying tricks, such as fake and slanted news, to disrupt attention and to reinforce a certain mind set. This is profitable, because it is exploitable: where the attention is, there the energy and money goes. Nobody does this, because of being "evil". It is rational in the current economic and legal system to act like this. The created environment delivers the incentives.

How about starting to change the toxic environment? Suppose, the economic and legal environment is created in a way that incentivizes the "good" in humans, rather than the "evil". "Good" is not exactly normative; it is simply sane with regard to the knowledge that exists about Earth systems and the state-of-the-art that can be deployed to enhance the environment, and through the environment any behaviour. The Earth would become a liveable place (ecologically, economically, and socially) where it's nice to be for everyone. An utopia with no connection to reality? Certainly not.

How to start the change? By design. By behavioural design, that can be applied on news consumption. Thanks to a clever design, individual readers become empowered and start to demand more high quality news. Thus, crowds can bundle their pressure on news providers, politicians, and the industry to deliver sane news and sane solutions. The best: such design on this platform can be made transparent, as there is no reason not to be sane, responsible, trustworthy, democratic, and globally inclusive. Eco News serve collective and natural purposes.

Lighthof shall be founded as a 'natural property', which is a corporation that belongs to itself and thus cannot be sold. By this deliberate choice of legal entity, it is assured that the organisation thrives as long as there is need for Lighthof, and it transforms once need transforms. This independence will maximise the adaptive capacity and resilience of Lighthof, meeting the needs of the global society.

For Lighthof to start up, it needs:

Interested to participate?

Lighthof is in the process to start up and apply to research funding calls.

If you are interested to participate in this project, reach out to the initiator, Dr. Christina Timko at the Ruhr-University Bochum.