166. I Save People & I Know Better Than You: How Not To Save The World / Anthea Lawson

About this episode

Nathalie Nahai interviews Anthea Lawson about her activism and new book on effective altruism.

In today’s conversation, I have the please of welcoming Anthea Lawson back onto the show. Having trained and worked as a reporter at The Times, and studied history at Cambridge, her work as an activist has seen Anthea campaign to shut down tax havens, control the arms trade and prevent banks from facilitating corruption and environmental devastation. While working at Global Witness, a human rights and environmental organisation, Anthea also launched a campaign that succeeded in changing the rules on secret company ownership, resulting in new laws being passed in dozens of countries around the world. A lot has changed since then – the geopolitical landscape has shifted, some of these laws have been repealed, and so her new book, How Not to Save the World: Doing Good Without Annoying Everyone is perfectly timed, and it’s coming out on June 4th. And given the theme and where we find ourselves right now, I felt like this would be the perfect moment to invite her back on the show. I first encountered Anthea in 2022, when I interviewed her on episode 86 about her book, The Entangled Activist . If you’re unfamiliar with her work, that is a fantastic place to start. BOOKS How Not to Save…

People in this episode

Host: Nathalie Nahai

Guest: Anthea Lawson

Topics covered

• activism
• environmental issues
• geopolitics
• human rights
• book discussion

Keywords

• activism
• tax havens
• arms trade
• environmental devastation
• human rights
• book release

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: The Times, Global Witness

Books & works: How Not to Save the World: Doing Good Without Annoying Everyone, The Entangled Activist

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