Thank you all - it helps to hear others' takes on things like this.
Obviously no everyone feels this way (and that's fine) but a main spiritual issue for me is climate change and the devastation it is bringing to the natural world. I've been following the science of it closely for over a decade, but the last few years things have gotten quite dire.
It's things like CO2 being dissolved into the oceans so fast they are acidifying faster than at any time in the last 300 million years (
link). They also are warming at an unprecedented rate. Between the warming, acidification, pollution, and overfishing, scientists suspect the oceans already are in the start of a mass extinction. Even if they haven't yet, it's hard to see how that possibly can be avoided.
The planet's surface is expected to warm a catastrophic 4 C above preindustrial temperatures by the end of the century, with more to follow, on our present path (
link). Even several decades from now the world won't be anything we are familiar with.
It's said that "nature bats last," but that she has the biggest bat. Indeed, when you study past extinctions, you find that things can get mind-bogglingly horrible. The oceans have lost their oxygen and got dominated by bacteria that emit poison gas. There were bands around the equator literally too hot for mammals, even for plants in some cases.
It's something that I find deeply disturbing. I stick to science, don't pay any real attention to activists and what have you. (The links above are just introductions about it. I actually get my information from scientific journal articles.) They are screaming as loudly as they can that we are at risk of our civilization ending, perhaps even before the end of the century.
Such dire statements of course get ridiculed by certain factions. They say environmentalism is the new religion.
For me it is in fact a spiritual issue. We are facing the end of our Eden. Mother Nature (for lack of a better term) is being hurt very badly, and she is beginning to hit back already. Her retaliation will almost certainly become devastatingly violent.
It is important to me to appreciate the natural energies that we are immersed in, but there is this other side of the coin, if you will, of the Goddess being so badly injured and striking back. It's been a difficult thing for me to deal with spiritually.