Paul Symon is an environmentalist who's out to make the world a better place, but he's overwhelmed by too much disjointed information, too much public apathy, too much self-serving talk and not enough action. Not to mention the opposition of greedy despoiler Jerry Landis, a successful venture capitalist who is dying of a rare disease that accelerates the aging process. Landis cares about only two things: making even more money, finding a way to arrest his medical condition. He'll go to any lengths to do either. That brings Landis and his fortune to the wild frontier of biotechnology, where his people are illegally experimenting with cross-species organ transplantation in California while breeding genetically altered primates at a secret site in the piney woods of south central Mississippi. Not only is Paul on the trail of this clandestine research, but there's also an eco-terrorist on the loose, bent on teaching hard lessons to people who are under the impression that the Earth and its creatures are theirs to destroy. These forces, together with 50,000 extra-large chacma baboons, collide in a explosion of laughter and wonder that Bill Fitzhugh's growing league of admirers is coming to recognize as his very own.