it goes where you can’t on the ground. “it’s very hard to get to the â­namibian desert by land, and if you do, you’d better not run out of gas. and you can’t get to the okavango delta by jeep. you’d get stuck. by air, though, you can see these places. so aerial photography opens up entire swaths of the earth that you could otherwise not reach.”

it makes us all look better — and smaller. “aerial photography shows a much more benign and generous view of mankind. [he points to a picture he’s taken of rooftops in kenya.] from the air, this looks like a checkerboard. but from the ground, there might be disease and poverty. from the ground, we’re also very human-centric. but from the air, you can see that there are huge chunks of the earth that have nothing to do with humans, where no humans live. that tells us that we have more potential to upset the fine balance of nature than to enhance it.”