Now the existential threat of nuclear weapons has been joined by the existential threat of climate change.
And thanks to the latest, alarming reports from the IPCC, we know that doing so is now an existential imperative.
And, at the very least, its leaders' meetings provide an opportunity for useful and sometimes informal bilateral talks.However, even some of those supporters concede that APEC now faces existential questions.
At times wonderfully funny, at times frightening, the book is filled with what we would now call existential panic, rendered not in an intuitive, dreamlike way, as in Carroll's "Jabberwocky" or "The Hunting of the Snark," but made to disturb through the invocation of a world almost but not quite like our own.
Where Greece had spent the previous winter in jubilation after successfully fending off the Italians, they now experienced existential horror at the inevitability of occupation by the Axis powers.
Humanity now faces existential crises on multiple fronts: extremes of economic disparity, a severely degraded global ecosystem, competition for dwindling natural resources including land and water, constant warfare, failed states, and a climate on the verge of spinning out of control.
Where Greece had spent the previous winter in jubilation after successfully fending off the Italians, they now experienced existential horror – the prime minister shot himself just days before the Germans marched into Athens – at the inevitability of occupation by the Axis powers.
But Belgium has now reached an existential impasse and is suffering an identity crisis.
Perhaps, more importantly, is the danger now of an existential variety, as opposed to mere criminal opportunism?
"Now is an existential moment for a discipline that will decide whether it will be a dinosaur or whether it will be reinvented".
