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.