A History of Environmental Entertainment: Part 1

From the 15 works that have been selected, it should be possible to grasp what some of the overarching trends have been in environmental-themed works of fiction. However, it would help even more to put those trends in a historical perspective, and that is what I will be doing now.
Although some earlier works, such as Green Mansions, had aspects of environmental themes, the genre truly came into its own in the early 1970s. This was a time of civil unrest in the United States, dissatisfaction with the government, and protests against segregation, the Vietnam War, and traditional sex roles. The newly emerged environmental movement, with its rejection of traditional values of industry and economy, fit in nicely in this era. In addition to the passing of the Environmental Protection Act, Clean Air Act, and Clean Water Act, a number of classics of environmental fiction were published during this time, such as The Lorax. Many of these works still hold up surprisingly well even today.
Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and so it was with the environmentalism fad of the 1970s. As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, and Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" took hold, environmentalism began to slip away from the public consciousness. Throughout the 1980s, very few works of fiction dealing with environmental themes were published, because as far as the general public was concerned it was no longer relevant. A notable exception was Hayao Miyazaki's splendid animated film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, but that, of course, did not come from the United States.
The genre would see a revival in the 1990s, thanks in part to a series of highly publicized industrial disasters in the late 1980s, such as the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown and the sinking of the Exxon Valdez.  However, the works of environmental fiction published in the 1990s were in many ways less well-informed and more superficial than their 1970s counterparts. Often, as was the case with FernGully and Captain Planet, the issues of environmentalism were reduced to two-dimensional battles between good and evil. Gone were the days of more nuanced works like The Lorax. 
In the end, the second golden age of environmental fiction ended, just as the first had, and today it remains a niche genre. But this brings us to the question for part two: how can aspiring writers make their environmental works both enticing and accurate?