(Well before astronauts went into space or the first satellite was launched, the poet Archibald MacLeish delivered a commencement address in 1942 rhapsodizing the planet as seen from the air, where it reveals itself as “a globe in practice, not in theory,” a “round earth where all directions eventually meet.”)

Some of the images Mr. Grant chooses document the sort of crises vast enough to alter Earth’s surface in just a few years — a California drought sapping a reservoir; the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, which formed on almost empty land and now looks like a city, packed with more than 80,000 inhabitants who have fled the civil war in Syria. Above the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor in August of 2015, you can see the fields of steel containers used to store radioactive water after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

But other pictures show things like environmental endeavors (massive wind and solar farms); land art (Robert Smithson’s gyring “Spiral Jetty” on the Great Salt Lake in Utah and an Argentine forest in the shape of a guitar); and the dazzling geometries of human habitation (star-shaped cities in Italy and the Netherlands, a palm-tree-shaped artificial island in Dubai).

Perhaps most compellingly for many Americans right now, the project shows swing states like Florida, Nevada and North Carolina as pleasing, placid abstractions, neither red nor blue. A residential development in Delray Beach, Fla., looks like a Mondrian painting. And the view from above, evoking the quietude of space, creates the added illusion of being able to release all your pent-up political frustrations into the ether. As the tagline for the movie “Alien” reminded us: “In space, no one can hear you scream.”

“I think it’s very easy for us these days to be caught up in our own echo chambers, with our own friends and our own cities and all the things we think we know,” Mr. Grant said. “A lot of the stuff on social media, about celebrity and politics, is so much about the individual. But when you look from above, you think more about the species, collectively.”