(editor'snote)

If a magazine decides to devote an entire issue to a single topic, that topic had better be a big one. At Audubon, there are a multitude of pressing environmental concerns competing for attention, though few merit a "special issue." The Everglades does, particularly when you consider the magnitude of the $7.8 billion ecosystem-restoration plan, the historic agreement between warring factions, and the precedent it sets for repairing other ecosystems.

Still, when it comes down to it, the Everglades' universal appeal is based on its promise of renewal. Ted Levin, who wrote "Reviving the River of Grass," has visited the Everglades more than 50 times since he was a boy growing up on New York's Long Island. "My childhood impressions were of an exotic landscape--sort of Africa without the lions and zebras," says the Vermont resident. "I now need the Everglades' wild, unpredictable nature as a tonic against winter lethargy. And any place shaped by hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and droughts is cool. The Everglades has always seemed wild and mysterious to me."

Cyril Zaneski, author of "Anatomy of a Deal," first set foot in the Everglades in 1992 as a reporter for The Miami Herald and has returned since leaving the paper last year to move to Washington, D.C., where he is a correspondent for the National Journal News Service. "The Everglades' remarkable ability to survive--even thrive--helps draw me to it," he says. "I love the idea of nature's triumph, because I grew up in a defeated environment: a little coal-mining town in northeastern Pennsylvania that has been a victim of mining practices that devastated streams and hillsides. It exists today in what seems to be a perpetual dusty haze. Though the Everglades is a victim of human greed, it is also a great survivor, and it deserves a chance to be restored. It's thrilling to see nature managing to triumph against the odds."