Shades of Green examines the impact of political, economic, religious, and scientific institutions on environmental activism around the world. The book highlights the diversity of national, regional and international environmental activism, showing that the term "environmentalism" covers an entire range of perceptions, values and interests. It demonstrates that each instance of environmental activism is shaped by historically unique circumstances, highlighting within each chapter the ideological, social, and political origins of efforts to protect the environment. Discussing issues unique to different parts of the world, Shades of Green shows that environmentalism around the globe has been strengthened, weakened, or suppressed by a variety of local, national, and international concerns, politics, and social realities.

Shades of Green examines the impact of political, economic, religious, and scientific institutions on environmental activism around the world. The book highlights the diversity of national, regional and international environmental activism, showing that the term 'environmentalism' covers an entire range of perceptions, values and interests. It demonstrates that each instance of environmental activism is shaped by historically unique circumstances, highlighting within each chapter the ideological, social, and political origins of efforts to protect the environment. Discussing issues unique to different parts of the world, Shades of Green shows that environmentalism around the globe has been strengthened, weakened, or suppressed by a variety of local, national, and international concerns, politics, and social realities.

While researching Russia's historical efforts to protect nature, Douglas Weiner unearthed unexpected findings: a trail of documents that raised fundamental questions about the Soviet political system. These surprising documents attested to the unlikely survival of a critical-minded, scientist-led movement through the Stalin years and beyond. It appeared that, within scientific societies, alternative visions of land use, resrouce exploitation, habitat protection, and development were sustained and even publicly advocated. In sharp contrast to known Soviet practices, these scientific societies prided themselves on their traditions of free elections, foreign contacts, and a pre-revolutionary heritage. Weiner portrays nature protection activists not as do-or-die resisters to the system, nor as inoffensive do-gooders. Rather, they took advantage of an unpoliced realm of speech and activity and of the patronage by middle-level Soviet officials to struggle for a softer path to development. In the process, they defended independent social and professional identities in the face of a system that sought to impose official models of behavior, ethics, and identity for all. Written in a lively style, this absorbing story tells for the first time how organized participation in nature protection provided an arena for affirming and perpetuating self-generated social identities in the USSR and preserving a counterculture whose legacy survives today.