Main Library

Celebrate the harvest season at The Community Library with our annual Seed Saver Fall Gathering. Seed saver John Caccia will host this seed packaging get together in the library’s lecture hall. This is a good opportunity to swap stories about your gardening experiences and learn about seed saving techniques.

Last year’s get-together was a lot of fun, and we gathered over 150 packets of locally saved seeds! We hope to get at least as many this year — packets and cleaning screens will be provided. All are encouraged to bring some seeds to share but, if you just want to listen and learn, that’s great, too.

BYO beverage/treats, folksy music and pumpkin carving will make this a festive seasonal gathering!

The Environmental Resource Center (ERC) hosts a special presentation on Philippine Eagles. Cordi and Joe Atkinson of the non-profit “Philippine Eagle Forest Watchers” will introduce participants to these magnificent birds through photos and short videos and will discuss the incredible threats they currently face.

Cordi and Joe have been involved with golden eagles for more than 30 years. They have rehabilitated young eagles by training them in the sport of falconry, teaching them the skills needed to survive, so that ultimately they can be released back into the wild. Over the years, this work has led to opportunities such as working on films produced by National Geographic, Nature, and most recently, Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

In 2015, Cordi and Joe traveled to the Philippines to work with two Philippine Eagles that were filmed as part of a documentary produced by Cornell to bring worldwide awareness to this critically endangered eagle. The Atkinsons were so deeply touched by these birds that they started their own non-profit to raise funds to support “The Forest Production and Management Projects” developed by the Philippine Eagle Foundation. With only 300 Philippine Eagles left on the planet, a worldwide effort must be made to save them, otherwise they may be gone forever in the next few decades.

“Country communities offer little inducement to the strictly modern practitioner,” wrote Dr. W. S. May of Underhill, Vermont, in 1899. “Too many country physicians are mere automatons, doing the bidding of pharmaceutic and manufacturing chemists, whose specialties are the sole materia medica, and whose therapeutics coincide with the monographs with which their table is gratuitously supplied.” Between about 1880 and the early 1920s, numerous articles like Dr. May’s appeared in medical journals that critiqued the practice of country doctors as unscientific or even dangerous.   Adept physicians, it was agreed, did not remain long in country practice before they decamped to a modern, urban, and much more scientific, medical practice.  

Between 1870 and 1920, even as the number of physicians was increasing dramatically, the ratio for doctors to rural population had dropped while the ratio in large cities had grown 36 percent.   By the 1920s, the disdain for rural practice had created an identifiable crisis in health care in rural areas that grew even more problematic in the middle of the twentieth century. Yet, even as the medical profession was heaping opprobrium on country doctors, popular culture outlets made them into venerated symbols of heroic American manhood similar to that of cowboys. This talk uses evidence from medical journals, movies, biographies and autobiographies, and popular magazines to explore and explain this cultural tension.

Charlotte Borst became the 13th president of the College of Idaho in June 2015. Borst is the first woman to hold the presidency in the College’s 125-year history. A native of Rutland, Vermont, she comes from a long line of educators.

Borst’s administrative career has been grounded in the liberal arts. Before coming to the C of I, she served six years as the vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty at Whittier College, in California. Prior to that, she served as provost and vice president for academic affairs at Rhodes College, in Tennessee, and dean of arts and sciences at Union College, in New York.

Throughout her career, Borst has helped build interdisciplinary programs, fostered internationalization and diversification through both on-campus and study abroad initiatives, supported faculty scholarship and research, managed significant enrollment increases, led strategic planning related to budgetary goals, building projects, faculty development, and more.

Dr. Borst’s academic interests focus on the history of science and medicine. A nationally-respected historian, her research explores the historical relationship of medical science and the complex gender and racial aspects of professionalization in the United States.