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Focusing on a global hub of aviation, Frankfurt Airport, this essay examines encounters between animals and technology in airport operation. In order to understand how airport practices constantly negotiate the borders with local environments or even produce new ones, we draw on Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of “borderlands.” Extending this notion from human to nonhuman inhabitants and passengers of airports opens up for novel possibilities to apprehend the affective dimension in the life-technology intersections at airports. In this sense, the airport is a site of multiple borderlands, producing intersections that include material and imaginative, sometimes violent, boundary drawing. We examine a broad set of multispecies borders and “borderlining” practices, their material cultures, and affective economies. What kind of local, historical legacies do airports struggle with and how do they cope with the underlying tensions of partially connected sites, sectors, and spaces? Throughout the essay, we historicize three encounters of the aviation infrastructure and its living environments and their affective economies: borderlining the airfield, borderlining the animal passenger, and borderlining the animal intruder. These examples highlight different modes of encounters, like clashes, coexistence, and care.

In recent years, cultural studies and cultural theory have experienced a new wave of ecological thought. Despite the engagement with the Anthropocene the history of ecology and the environmental sciences has remained somewhat of a puzzle. This goes especially for the 20th century, a period when the sciences of the environment came to matter on a broader scale. Why do we actually know so little about the environmental sciences in the 20th century? And what could a history of the environmental sciences in that period look like? This article answers these questions with two interrelated arguments. First, by reflecting on different approaches to write the history of ecology since the 1970s, it uncovers crucial entanglements between the history of science and ecological thought that created blind spots regarding the environmental sciences in the 20th century. Second, it argues for a shift in scales of analysis—towards meso‐scales. With a more regional approach historians can engage with the often‐neglected aspects of the political and economic history of the environmental sciences in the 20th century and thereby also reveal their fundamental infrastructural dimension. Because at its core, the article claims, the environmental sciences were and are essentially infrastructural sciences.

ArgumentThe historiography of botanical maps has mainly concentrated on their alleged “golden age,” on maps drawn by famous first-generation plant geographers. This article instead describes botanical maps after the age of discovery, and detects both a quantitative explosion and qualitative modification in the late nineteenth century. By spotlighting the case of the plant geographer Oscar Drude (1852–1933), I argue that the dynamics of botanical mappings were closely linked to a specific milieu of knowledge production: the visual culture of Imperial Germany. The scientific upgrading of maps was stimulated by a prospering commercial cartographical market as well as a widespread practice of mediating between professionals and amateurs via maps in the public sphere. In transferring skills and practices from these “popular” fields of knowledge to scientific domains, botanists like Oscar Drude established maps as an indispensable element of botanical observation. This wholesale dissemination of botanical maps had thus a formative influence on collective perception – the botanist's “period eye” – regarding plant distribution.

After Knowledge: Science, Deregulation, and Restoration. In the light of recent phenomena and developments – from ‘alternative facts’ to the rise of the ‘New Right’ –, the notion that we live in a ‘knowledge society’ (which has served our discipline well over the last couple of decades) seems more than a little antiquated. Our present, or so it would seem, is determined by forces other than ‘knowledge’ or, for that matter ‘science’. By the same token, ‘knowledge’ has lost traction for the purposes of a historiography trying to keep abreast with the times. At this impasse, we propose that historians of science embrace our predicament head‐on. They should take a more serious interest in the trajectories that brought us here: that is, in recent history and the political and ideological projects which shaped it. We suggest two complementary concepts along which such analyses might proceed: deregulation and restoration.

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