3 ways Jimmy Carter changed the world for the better

In 2016, National Geographic published a particularly unusual letter to the editor: a dispatch from none other than former president of the United States Jimmy Carter.

In a story about efforts to eradicate blindness worldwide, Nat Geo hadn’t mentioned preventable blindness due to infections spread by flies and parasites, the 39th president noted—and his nongovernmental organization, the Carter Center, had administered nearly 60 million treatments to prevent such infections just that year.

(Read Jimmy Carter's full letter to National Geographic.)

It was pure Jimmy Carter: gentle in tone, pragmatic in approach, and deferential to changemakers working to improve the world for all. But characteristically, it downplayed the president’s own contributions to making the world a better place—contributions that not just changed the world but may have saved it. 

As the 98-year-old former president enters the final days of his life in home hospice care, here are just three of the ways the soft-spoken Georgia peanut farmer changed the world for the better.

1. He helped avert a nuclear disaster in Canada

Born James Earl Carter, Jr., on October 1, 1924, Carter grew up in small-town Georgia before joining the U.S. Navy as a submariner and officer. The promise—and peril—of nuclear weapons would go on to define his career. Tasked with helping develop the nation’s first nuclear submarine program, the future president was deeply involved in a technology that would prove vital throughout the Cold War and beyond.

But in 1952, he got up close and personal with the technology’s dangers when he oversaw the cleanup of a partial nuclear meltdown at an experimental plant in Ottawa, Canada.

During the meltdown, millions of gallons of radioactive water filled the reactor’s basement in the wake of a partial rupture of fuel rods in the plant. Thanks to his top-secret training, Carter was one of just a handful of people cleared to address the meltdown.

(Learn about Jimmy Carter's life with your kids.)

The assignment came with plenty of peril: After mapping out their moves on a dummy of the plant built on a nearby tennis court, Carter and his colleagues would be lowered into the reactor for a short period of time each.

“We...worked frantically for our allotted time,” Carter recalled in his 1975 campaign biography, Why Not The Best? “We had absorbed a year’s maximum allowance of radiation in one minute and twenty-nine seconds.”

The future president’s urine and feces were radioactive for months. But, he wrote, “There were no apparent aftereffects from this exposure—just a lot of doubtful jokes among ourselves.”

2. He was a pioneer for green energy

Alternative forms of energy would help define Carter’s achievements—and he would become the first president to install solar panels at the White House. After leaving the Navy to take over his late father’s peanut farms in 1953, Carter became involved in local, then state and national Democratic politics. After winning Georgia’s 1971 gubernatorial election, he went on to win the 1976 presidential election.

Carter governed through a tumultuous time in his nation’s history, leading a nation split by the Vietnam War and demoralized by the upheaval of social change. He turned his sights toward tumult abroad. But at home, things were no less contentious, especially during the 1979 energy crisis that became a test—and hallmark—of his presidency.

(What is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?)

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The nation’s population and economy had boomed in the wake of World War II. But so had its dependence on foreign oil. By the time Carter took office, energy had become prohibitively expensive, and the nation’s energy consumption was more than twice that of other developed nations.

In 1979, oil prices began to surge even higher. Carter had taken action earlier in his presidency to address the impending crisis—establishing the Department of Energy and proposing an energy plan that put forth nuclear energy and other forms of renewable energy as a possible solution with “very real and practical” benefits, despite the risk of increased weaponization.

But Carter believed that everyday people could help, too, and he embraced an ethos of personal energy conservation that became his signature. In a 1979 address, Carter called on ordinary Americans to conserve energy in their own homes, changing their personal habits for the good of all. “On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny,” he said.

For Carter himself, that resulted in changes not just in policy, but at the White House, where he turned down the thermostat, wore a beige sweater in the Oval Office to stave off the cold, and installed the building’s first solar panels.

But the solar panels only heated the house’s water for seven years. Carter was ultimately unable to rally the public around his austere energy policies, In 1986, in a gesture reflective of the unpopularity of those policies, Republican President Ronald Reagan had the solar panels removed. (President Barack Obama would later reinstall solar in 2010.)

Today, however, Carter’s views on energy generation and conservation, along with his sweeping conservation policies, are largely seen as ahead of their time.

3. He's helped save millions of lives worldwide 

But Carter may have made his biggest mark on the world after his single-term presidency. After leaving office, he founded the Carter Center and became a noted human rights advocate, elections monitor, and peace negotiator with a Nobel Peace Prize to his name. But bringing vitally needed healthcare to the world was one of his biggest post-presidential legacies.

(Jimmy Carter on the greatest challenges of the 21st century.)

The flagship accomplishment of Carter’s work in health care was an international campaign to wipe out Guinea worm disease, a parasitic infection caused by drinking contaminated water that in 1986 affected 3.5 million people per year—largely in low-income nations in tropical areas.

The disease causes a worm to grow up to a meter in length, then emerge through its victim’s skin, causing devastating pain. Though rarely fatal, the parasite’s slow emergence can incapacitate its host for months on end and lead to secondary infections or permanent disability.

Since there is no way to cure or vaccinate against the disease, the Carter Center worked to train over 100,000 village-based health care workers who treat Guinea worm disease and other illnesses. It also provided millions of water filters to protect people from swallowing the parasite and developed education programs that teach locals how to prevent disease transmission.

It worked: In January 2023, the Carter Center announced that just 13 cases had been counted in the last year and that an estimated 200 countries have now been certified Guinea worm disease-free. The Carter Center is still working to eradicate the disease, as well as the control and prevention of other neglected tropical diseases like river blindness—the parasitic disease that Carter had written about in his letter to National Geographic.

Carter had a close relationship with the National Geographic Society and, in 2000, he explained his ethos in an address at Nat Geo headquarters. “There’s no way to separate peace from freedom, from democracy, from human rights, from environmental quality, and from the alleviation of suffering,” he said. “I hope to find a way to transform the despair that people feel into hope and the expectation of a better life.”