These are the best and worst of times for grassroots environmentalists in China. Just ask Xi Zhinong. The 33 year old government photographer learned in 1995 that a small county in Yunnan province had sold loggers the right to clear cut a 200 square kilometre swath of primeval forest on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Xi raised an outcry that cost him his job. But it helped save a section of old growth forest and at least 200 snub nosed monkeys-one of the country's most endangered species.