The ancient bus toiled up through golden canola fields and ripening apricot orchards, stopping only for a quick lunch at a Muslim restaurant before resuming the long climb. Could this really be Tibet? Outside were whitecapped Muslims and Chinese checkpoints, but in the bus Tibetan nomads, their city business done, were on their way home to the mountains.

From the window, signs of Tibetan culture gradually appeared. Prayer flags mingled with television antennas. The valleys narrowed, the mountains came closer, streams ran faster, the Tibetans aboard sang and joked. White Buddhist shrines stood in the fields of ripening wheat, guarding the power places of the valleys.

Coming from the utterly Chinese city of Xining, on the edge of Tibet, the transition to an authentically Tibetan environment is slow. But here we were, in a village of Tibetan farmers, their ancient irrigation channels swiftly flowing, the women weeding the waisthigh green wheat, making their supple way through the crop without damaging an ear.

It was a picture postcard of Tibetan tranquillity, I thought as I wandered the narrow lanes between mudwalled houses. It looked timeless, except for the massive power pylons along the road, far from the restless pace of the Internet, the accelerating speed of globalisation. Yet it was this arcadian idyll that propelled me into a contest over multibilliondollar plans to globalise even these villagers.

Not until some of the village elders gathered was my tourist fantasy burst. They had an urgent message for the outside world, which they asked this rare visitor to convey. ¡°Look further up the valley,¡± the oldest man said. Upstream, I made out a large squat industrial building shrouded in white smoke. Only its chimney stood clear. ¡°That's the aluminium smelter,¡± the old man said. ¡°The smoke settles on the hillsides. If we let our sheep or donkeys out to graze, their teeth turn yellow and brittle, then fall out. Our animals starve, and we lose our livelihood. Can't you tell the United Nations about this? If nothing is done the smelter will kill us.¡±

I couldn't imagine the UN or any official institution being willing to intervene in China's business. ¡°Isn't there some way you can tell the authorities and get some action?¡± I asked. ¡°You don't understand. We can say nothing, even if it's against China's law to put such a factory right in the heart of our valley, because anything we say is labelled as Tibetan splittism, nationalism which is punished mercilessly. The only people we could take any complaint to are the cadres of the county government, and it is they who set up and own this factory. It employs their relatives. There is nowhere for us to turn.¡±

All I could do was take photos. The closer I got to the factory, the filthier it appeared. This was an environmental tragedy, but what could anyone do? I felt helpless. On my return to Australia I remembered the hero of my adolescence, Izzy Stone, who uncovered the darker side of America's war in Vietnam and much else. Stone had a simple belief that in the modern world, disastrous policies generate enormous paper trails: reports, studies, project design documents, committee minutes, official approvals. When stitched together, they form a damning picture of how the best and brightest minds can do horrific things. Since those days, I'd spent much time with Tibetans, who have a similarly unflagging faith that if only the world gets to know of their sufferings, the world will act to set them free. But the real world is too busy to care, and everything gets faster.

Unlike Izzy Stone, I had access to the Internet, a globalised deluge of data from which I might piece together a coherent narrative. In China, it is a crime punishable by death to reveal state secrets online, and the state defines and redefines its secrets at any time. The Tongren County Aluminium Smelter may prefer its backblock Tibetan obscurity to the global gaze of the Web, but surely there was useful information out there somewhere.

I found out that aluminium smelters can readily install endofthepipe technology to treat the smoke and remove toxic fluoride. Major smelters such as Portland, partly owned by the Chinese Government, take care to abide by the rules and filter out the fluoride. But why hadn't anyone done so in Tibet?

I searched the daily online English editions of China Daily and People's Daily. They speak for a government determined to be upbeat and admit few problems. They announced China's first nationwide electricity grid, to remove hydro power from Tibet for the wealthy consumers of the booming coastal cities. More hydro dams on the Tibetan stretch of the Yellow River, more aluminium cable to carry power eastward, more efficient exploitation of Tibet, were all part of the march of progress.

But was there a downside? What would be the environmental and human cost of these grand plans? China's media are no place to find investigative journalism. If there was another side to the story, I would have to piece it together, as Izzy Stone did, slowly and laboriously.

The US Geological Survey site gave me hard figures on China's hunger for aluminium and demand for the massive electricity consumption needed to smelt it. An American company, Kaiser, had teamed with Chinese smelters just downstream of Tibet, only to pull out a year later when Chinese Government ministries had been unable to fulfil their promises of electricity for the smelters. Not only was the jigsaw filling, it was starting to look as if foreign investors might be directly involved. This would be a shock to Tibetans, who must now face the prospect that they are no longer beyond the frontiers of globalisation. But it would galvanise the cyber warriors, the global online community of activists using global technology to oppose globalisation's obliteration of everything local, unique and authentic. My hacktivist friends in the US would want to know if a US corporation was a key player in Tibet's industrialisation. It would give them leverage, making it a domestic issue about American values. The new worldwide cyber activist community has an ability to stage imaginative actions that capture media attention. All they need is someone to do the research. That research can be done as well in a Collingwood cottage as in a sleek think tank in Washington...