Former President Jimmy Carter turned 100 on Tuesday. His birthday was celebrated from his eastern hometown of Plains, Ga. to the west coast Monterey Bay office of Habitat for Humanity, one of his philanthropic passions.

National news organizations descended on the rural town of Plains (pop. 577) to interview locals, hear a few speeches and witness a U.S. citizen naturalization ceremony. Carter watched a military jet flyover from his home, where he has been in hospice care for the past 19 months. He has not attended a public event since the Nov. 2023 memorial service for Rosalynn, his wife of 77 years. Carter is the oldest living U.S. president, surpassing George W. Bush, who died at age 94.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.