There are three sorts of flows of creativity which we find especially closely related to change in our cultural images that influence attitudes to place.  For the most part, these create internal landscapes within us, which influence our behaviours to, and within, particular places.  Many of these moments of creativity are concerned with recognising the present in the past.

One is scientific discovery, with or without consequences in technology; for science is by definition concerned with introducing change into 'right' knowledge. In some forms it does this by simply adding, or extending, a habitual approach; in others, by bringing about a 'revolution' and opening out whole new avenues for further advance. Our day to day world is evidence of this and we define progress as solving problems in such a way as to enable further problems to be faced and in their turn solved.

Another category is the expressive arts. Artists, in this context means painters, musicians, sculptors, poets, dramatists, architects, and so on, shading off into those concerned with the applied arts, dress design, media copy- writing, etc.)  The expressive arts captures and objectifies values and attitudes, collective perceptions and dreams and intimations, often with peculiar precision. Sometimes artists do this to order, sometimes not; occasionally they convey more than they intend; but at their best they convey the very latest state of feeling, even when they are not out to announce it. It is not by accident that the word 'culture' is often narrowed down to refer to their business of producing expressive objects, the symbols or distillations of much more broadly- spreading patterns of value. By their nature artists are more or less fated to reflect change, and in modern European societies it is expected that they should herald it, anticipate it and be prophets, seers, scouts of the future.

From prehistoric times 35,000 years ago, artists have expressed values of environment and these values, which came into existence to encapsulate feelings about a particular place, hold important positions in our heritage. However, the images of animals upon, which the local survival of Palaeolithic hunters depended, initially enter the imagination as artistic reproductions of the actual places and images. This highlights a generalism, that our values of environment seldom come from actual contact with places that are, or were, real.  For most people they are selected either from visual contact with a painting, or more likely, a photograph, and increasingly from a video or holiday brochure. Values about where to go and what to protect are carried by collections of visual icons about particular places.

A third stream of ideas about environment comes from the recent political development of ecologism.