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Second, it argues for a shift in scales of analysis-towards meso‐scales. 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. 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.
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This goes especially for the 20th century, a period when the sciences of the environment came to matter on a broader scale. Despite the engagement with the “Anthropocene” the history of ecology and the environmental sciences has remained somewhat of a puzzle. In recent years, cultural studies and cultural theory have experienced a new wave of ecological thought. First acquiring and then deepening our atmospheric sensibility will provide a better understanding of the environmental history of health and pandemics in the current geological epoch. Areas of research could include, among many other possibilities, the difference between indoor and open-air work, or the importance of respiration, physiology and lung medicine in history. This knowledge can then be put to use to both create and strengthen specific themes in the environmental history of health. Obtaining this sensibility entails observing the way in which meteorological experts have used this knowledge to expand their discipline, in both the scientific and public realm. Historians should acquire what I call an ‘atmospheric sensibility’ by looking at the sensibility of atmosphere scientists of the past. At the same time, environmental historians could also benefit from engaging with the history of knowledge about air, not just late modern meteorology, but also early modern physics and chemistry, and the pre-nineteenth century medical sciences that were less hesitant about dealing with the air. Environmental historians who attribute a larger role to the atmosphere should follow recent trends in the larger ‘geohumanities’, a new field that has exported the meteorologists’ atmosphere into the humanities. Dealing with the atmosphere is useful for another reason too: in the current age, atmosphere physicists and chemists have become key architects of the Anthropocene concept, and the meteorological sciences are increasingly claiming a stake in the environmental humanities. Increasingly, atmosphere scientists are contributing to the science of COVID-19. These examples highlight different modes of encounters, like clashes, coexistence, and care.įuture historians writing about the COVID-19 crisis will need to pay more attention to the atmosphere and its role in the current crisis, for the atmosphere is connected to the current pandemic in multiple ways: the atmosphere transports aerosols it changes as a consequence of the social crisis air pollution and COVID-19 deaths seem to be connected there is a triple crisis of ‘oxygen-depriving politics’ and air travel has a large effect on the transmission of the disease. 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. We examine a broad set of multispecies borders and “borderlining” practices, their material cultures, and affective economies. In this sense, the airport is a site of multiple borderlands, producing intersections that include material and imaginative, sometimes violent, boundary drawing. 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.
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Focusing on a global hub of aviation, Frankfurt Airport, this essay examines encounters between animals and technology in airport operation.