Blue Marble (Eastern Hemisphere)

The Blue Marble duo comes to us via NASA's recent release of the "Most Amazing High Definition Image of Earth." Over the last several weeks, we have traveled through space and time together, with a special series of gorgeously presented works from the public domain that benefit the 20x200 Artist Fund. While all of the images have been thrilling, the pairing of these two, ahem, world views is particularly poignant. We began (perhaps somewhat self-centeredly) with our own Western perspective, but the flip side Blue Marble (Eastern Hemisphere) serves as a reminder that this "other half" is truly a world apart from our own day-to-day experience. Take in the awesomeness of the African continent, a land of spectacular beauty mired with famine, drought and violence. Consider the Middle East, the cradle of civilization, long-suffering with conflict of all kinds and without whose vast natural resources our own culture would be lost. And India, teeming as the second-most populous nation on the