Jimmy Carter, the longest-living former president and a lifelong environmental champion, died Sunday at his home in Plains, Georgia.
He was 100 and had been receiving hospice care since February 2023.
“My father was a hero, not only to me but to everyone who believes in peace, human rights, and unselfish love,” said Chip Carter, one of the former president’s sons, in a statement released by the Carter Center.
Carter kept largely out of the public eye since the Carter Center announced last year that he had “decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care instead of additional medical intervention” after a series of short hospital stays.
But he attended a memorial service on Nov. 28, 2023, in Atlanta for his 96-year-old wife Rosalynn Carter, a leading mental health advocate. She had been diagnosed with dementia in May 2023. The Carters celebrated their 77th anniversary that July, which made them the longest-married presidential couple in history.
Carter, a former peanut farmer and one-term governor of Georgia, was the first presidential candidate to run a winning campaign focused heavily on environmental issues and went on to a slew of environmental accomplishments during his single term in the White House.
After going to the White House in January of 1977, he created the Department of Energy in his first year in office and put in place the first fuel economy standards for cars.
In one of his biggest achievements, Carter used his executive authority to set aside 56 million acres of Alaska land as federally protected national monuments.
And his administration strengthened the role of EPA, establishing the Superfund program to begin cleaning up hazardous waste sites and spills around the nation.
Carter also had 32 solar panels installed on the roof of the White House and urged Americans to lower their thermostats to 65 degrees Fahrenheit during the daytime and 55 F at night as a way to save energy.
While environmentalists were quick to jump on the Carter bandwagon when he launched his presidential campaign, many of them soured later when green issues took a back seat to his efforts to battle high inflation and end the Iranian hostage crisis.
Despite their disillusionment, Carter is still regarded by many as one of the top conservation presidents in history, often mentioned with the likes of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt.
After serving in the White House only one term from 1977 to 1981, Carter returned to Georgia, where his passion for green issues never subsided. In 2017, he leased 10 acres of his family’s farmland to build a solar farm with 3,852 panels, enough to power more than half of Plains.
The National Park Service has for years been preparing to convert the private Carter residence on the outskirts of Plains into a historical museum. It will be opened to public tours once the house is no longer occupied, but that process could take years.
“Growing up on a farm, I understood the protection of the earth was the individuals’ responsibility and that we must carefully manage and enhance nature rather than degrade or waste it,” Carter wrote in November 2019 as he accepted the Georgia Conservancy’s Distinguished Conservationist Award.
In an op-ed, published in Time magazine that month, Carter called climate change an “existential threat” and said it will never be solved by men alone.
“We cannot solve this complex problem as long as women and girls, half of the world’s population, have unequal access to education and decision-making bodies at all levels and are largely excluded from local, national, and global efforts to respond to this challenge,” Carter wrote in the op-ed, which he penned with Karin Ryan, senior advisor for human rights and special representative on women and girls at the Carter Center.
Carter, who was 52 when he became the nation’s 39th president, was born in Plains on Oct. 1, 1924. His father was a farmer and businessman, while his mother worked as a registered nurse.
He received a bachelor’s degree from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946 and became a submariner in the Atlantic and Pacific fleets, eventually rising to the rank of lieutenant. In 1946, he married his high school sweetheart, Rosalynn Smith of Plains, and resigned his naval commission when his father died in 1953, returning to run the family farm.
He soon became involved in politics, serving on county boards overseeing education, the local hospital authority and the library. He won election to the Georgia Senate in 1962 and lost his first gubernatorial campaign in 1966 but won the second time he ran, in 1970.
Carter, the author of 32 books, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, cited for his “decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”
In recent years, he volunteered one week a year for Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit organization that helps needy people renovate and build homes. He enjoyed fly-fishing, woodworking and swimming and taught Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church of Plains, where he served as a deacon.
Carter often tied his religious beliefs to his pro-environmental views. In 2006, he said he had been “nurtured as a southern Baptist” and attended weekly Bible studies all his life, where he learned that “the earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.”
In his last Sunday school class in 2019, after a year of medical maladies, including surgery to relieve pressure on his brain, Carter told visitors he expected to die very quickly in 2015 after doctors discovered his melanoma had spread to his brain and liver.
But after praying about it, he said, the prospect of death had left him “absolutely and completely at ease.”
“I’m going to live again after I die,” he said. “I don’t know what form I’ll take or anything, but I have confidence that there is a God and he’s all powerful, that he keeps his promises, and he’s promised us life after death.”
“You have a wonderful eternal life to look forward to,” Carter added.
Survivors include his four children and 11 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.
