THE VAST FIELD is littered with splintered branches, crushed red berries and dead leaves, and tire tracks indent the mud where a thicket used to stand. Sawdust fills the warm, blue sky as a trailer-sized wood chipper noisily consumes a tree trunk. Rob Loflin surveys this war zone in southern Florida and smiles. "I'm the king of devastation," he jokes, standing next to the shattered red stump of a recently pulverized Australian pine.

Loflin is the director of natural resources for Sanibel Island, a city of about 6,000 residents just off the coast of Fort Myers, Florida. At his bidding, a crew of men and machines are sawing down and grinding up nearly every piece of vegetation on this 300-acre plot. Despite appearances, this is part of an ambitious and nearly unprecedented conservation program: an effort to rid an entire community of weedy nonnative plants by 2010.

Across the country, some foreign plants and animals--known as "exotics" or "aliens"-are causing ecological and economic head-aches. Whether introduced accidentally or intentionally, these species are crowding out or killing native flora, fauna and crops.

Exotics cost the nation an estimated $138 billion each year and pose the primary threat to 42 percent of America's imperiled species, according to scientists at Cornell University.

Florida is suffering more from this biological invasion than any other state on the continent.

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