This paper explores a critical moment in the history of field science, considering the emergence of automobility and the American roadscape as formative epistemic infrastructures for early twentieth-century ecology. Drawing on the plant ecologists Frederic and Edith Clements’ use of the automobile as a tool of research, it considers the role of mobility in ecological practice and thought. The Clements’ research involved extensive regional surveys covering vast distances by car – automobiles profoundly transformed the scale and geographies of ecological fieldwork, with cars serving as mobile laboratories, carrying typewriters, cameras, and field instruments, compressing the temporal practices of data collection and facilitating rapid, comparative surveys.
However, these practices were carried out on an automotive infrastructure still rudimentary and unevenly consolidated. The experience of early automobility was thus deeply embedded in the environment traversed – travellers were exposed to the travails of dust, rain, mud and extreme temperatures. The breakdowns, delays, and accidents of these journeys underscore the natural environment’s ability to destabilize the technological apparatus of the scientific expedition, requiring improvisational knowledge and navigational skills. The paper suggests that automobility informed the scale, metaphors, and applied practices of American ecology in the first half of the twentieth century. By situating ecological research within the material practices of its production, this analysis foregrounds the car as a mediating technology between scientists and the environment. It reveals how roads operated as both constraints and affordances of environmental knowledge, highlighting how knowledge in transit both shapes and is shaped by the settings it traverses.