” “Now, of course, having failed in every attempt to subdue the Glades by frontal attack, we are slowly killing it off by tapping the River of Grass. In the questionable name of progress, the state in its vast wisdom lets every two-bit developer divert the flow into drag-lined canals that give him ‘waterfront’ lots to sell. As far north as Corkscrew Swamp, virgin stands of ancient bald cypress are dying. All the area north of Copeland had been logged out, and will never come back. As the glades dry, the big fires come with increasing frequency. The ecology is changing with egret colonies dwindling, mullet getting scarce, mangrove dying of new diseases born of dryness.”

“Bright Orange for the Shroud”, Ross MacDonald

“This was in a paperback originally published in 1965 when the general public was still not conversant with the concept of environmentalism.”

From the Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travis_McGee

Maybe they’ll revisit Magnum PI when he is using a walker and armed with a stun gun and a cattle prod which he regularly uses on Higgins who is now a doddering old man confined to a wheelchair and has Alzheimers. Higgins regularly wanders off the estate in his motorized wheelchair, gets lost and wanders into the middle of a murder investigation and Magnum has to rescue him, solve the murder and take Higgins home for his next cattle prod treatment which we learn in the last episode of the new series is actually a cure for Alzheimers. In the last scene, we see both men at seaside, the moon coming out over a red horizon, sea waves breaking on the shore, the ghosts of Zeus and Apollo sitting loyally beside Higgins, growling at Magnum.