The familiar photo of the Earth spinning in the blackness of space that was taken 50 years ago by William Anders, an astronaut on the Apollo 8 lunar mission, starkly illustrated our isolation on this planet. Now we face a crisis as the climate and environmental conditions that support life as we know it become ever more fragile owing to CO₂-induced global warming. The evidence suggests there is significant risk that areas of the Earth in tropical zones may become uninhabitable and that significant food chains will collapse in this century. 

Infectious disease has been a formidable force in shaping human history. In the times past, most people died from two causes: violence and infectious disease, with deaths from infectious disease being many times more common. Bubonic plague killed between a third and a half of the population of Europe in the Middle Ages, thus changing the course of Europe and the world forever. Smallpox killed half a billion people in the 20th century alone before being finally eradicated in 1982.

The European Union (EU) is a large and powerful economic area. With a gross domestic product of around 19 trillion dollars in 2018, the EU has a similar economic size as the United States of America.1 It is home to 512 million inhabitants and will remain more populous than the United States even after the possible departure of Great Britain in March 2019.2 Europe hosts numerous world market leading firms, especially in manufacturing, which export high-quality products everywhere. It is a highly competitive and advanced economy.

In December, a group of the French protesters known as gilets jaunes were stopping motorists at a traffic circle where the N151 meets the D951A, next to a forested hill in Burgundy. The gilets, so called for their distinctive yellow traffic-emergency vests, had banded together a month before to rally against a tax on diesel. Over several weeks, though, their grievance had grown less political (about this or that policy) and more existential (about the impossibility of making ends meet in France’s boondocks).