The curious thing about the modern iteration of our species is the way in which it relates to the national park system. The religious awe that arises out of the contact with sublime works of nature is limited to specific spatial instances in which those sublime works occur.
It takes the expenditure of a great amount of energy - whether fault lines and volcanoes push up mountains, glaciers cut through valleys, waters carve out canyons and caves, or whole rainforests rise and fall - to make enough of an impression on the individual - generally through the visual and limbic systems - to inspire a worship of nature, or at least a reverence great enough to drive towards its preservation.
With a flat and seemingly featureless stretch of land, who cares? Plaster it with parking lots and strip malls and be done with it. Never mind the soil underneath, and the surrounding communities and ecosystems.
In the same way, it is often the artifacts of marginalized and indigenous culture that are able to penetrate mainstream consciousness, when it is not the screaming and waving hands of marginalized activists themselves.
It may be the internal failures of the dominant culture itself that serve to further open that aperture of awareness, casting into relief the sacredness of a wider range of experience, that is, as long as those failures aren't making that same arena of experience the sworn enemy of said failing culture.
