Jennifer Garner’s Daughter Violet Recalls Arguing With Mom As LA Fires Destroyed Their Neighborhood

Violet Affleck has penned an essay about public health. On May 18, the eldest child of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner published a piece in The Yale Global Health Review titled, “A Chronically Ill Earth: COVID Organizing as a Model Climate Response in Los Angeles.” In her paper, the 19-year-old, who is a freshman at Yale University, compared the COVID pandemic response to that of the Los Angeles wildfires earlier this year and recalled getting into an argument with her mom as parts of the city burned. “I spent the January fires in Los Angeles arguing with my mother in a hotel room. She was shell-shocked, astonished at the scale of destruction in the neighborhood where she raised myself and my siblings. I was 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,” Affleck wrote. She continued, “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.”