ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some relatively recent efforts to reflect on my own and others’ efforts to conceptualize environments as they affect and are affected by the development of extreme talent in individuals. In doing so I have had something of a crystallizing experience, to use a term I dreamed up almost 20 years ago (although it has also become associated with my colleague Howard Gardner in the interim; cf. Walters & Gardner, 1986). I have found that the need to say something about how specific environments or envi ronmental processes affect development of exceptional potential has pro vided a set of conditions for me to refine a view of environments that has been more or less there for the better part of two decades, but that has become somewhat more explicit as a consequence of the current exercise.
