Violet, the eldest daughter of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner, shared an intense disagreement she had with her mom in a hotel room about the disastrous LA wildfires, in a straightforward essay for Yale University.
Now 19 and a freshman at Davenport College, Violet discussed the heartfelt argument with her mother, famously known for “13 Going on 30” and now 53 years old, in a scholarly paper published in the school’s Global Health Review.
She disclosed that she and her renowned mother — who also has two other children, Seraphina, 16, and Samuel, 13, with the “Good Will Hunting” actor — had a dispute about climate change after the wildfires compelled them to leave their luxurious home as the devastating fires spread across California in January.
“I spent the January fires in Los Angeles arguing with my mother in a hotel room,” Violet wrote in her paper, titled, “A Chronically Ill Earth: COVID Organizing as a Model Climate Response in Los Angeles.”
The teenager complained that the behavior of the “wealthiest citizens” was one of the driving forces behind the “climate crisis.”
Garner, for her part, was “shell-shocked, astonished at the scale of destruction in the neighborhood where she raised myself and my siblings” — leaving Violet “surprised at her surprise.”
“As a lifelong Angelena and climate-literate member of generation Z, my question had not been whether the Palisades would burn but when,” added Violet.
“As I chatted with adults in the hotel where we’d gone to escape the smoke, though, I found my position to be an uncommon one: people spoke of how long rebuilding would take, how much it would cost, and how tragically odd the whole situation had been,” she continued.
“The crisis was acute, a burst of bad luck. It had come from a combination of high winds and low rains.”
Violet also recalled her younger brother, Samuel, being skeptical that the wildfires had anything to do with climate change, asking, “What did global warming have to do with the speed of the wind?
“Hopefully, most of us understand the climate crisis better than my little brother,” she wrote.
Elsewhere in her essay, Violet described climate change as “existential and accelerating.”
“It’s anthropogenic,” she writes, “Driven by unsustainable consumption patterns concentrated among the wealthiest citizens of the wealthiest countries, all of which have already subjected most of this country and the world to deadly temperatures, fire-flood cycles, rising seas, and dying crops.”
The teen concluded her paper by comparing public health protocols used in climate disasters, while calling for recognition of the “methods and political commitments” of COVID-conscious and disabled communities.
Prior to enrolling at Yale, Violet made an appearance at a Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors meeting in July 2024, where she demanded mask mandates in LA hospitals.
Violet shared her experience with recovering from viruses in an emotional plea, saying, “the county must oppose mask bans for any reason.”
