Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner’s daughter Violet Affleck went into detail this week about how she and her mother argued about the causes of the Los Angeles wildfires that destroyed their Pacific Palisades neighborhood in January.
“I spent the January fires in Los Angeles arguing with my mother in a hotel room,” the 19-year-old wrote in Yale’s Global Health Review, where she is a student, in a piece published on Sunday titled: “A Chronically Ill Earth: COVID Organizing as a Model Climate Response in Los Angeles.”
Affleck continued of Garner, “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.”
She wrote that while some people at the hotel saw the wildfires as a “burst of bad luck” that was a combination of high winds and little rain, she knew it was related to the “climate crisis.”
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Along with Violet, Affleck and Garner, who divorced in 2018, also share Fin,16, and Samuel, 13.
Affleck compared people being forced to wear N95 masks because of poor air quality after the fires to the COVID-19 pandemic, writing that, like the health crisis, climate change will “soon become impossible for even society’s most insulated to ignore.”
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She wrote about the “promised end to the pandemic has been more a matter of public relations than public health,” adding that public health officials were soon forced to grapple with “ongoing waves of infection” even as the country came “out of the pandemic.”
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She also noted that coronavirus can be “a threat to even the healthiest individuals,” specifying long COVID as an example.
Last summer, the first-year college student, who often still wears masks, appeared at a Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors Meeting, speaking out against mask bans after Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said she was looking at the legality of wearing masks at protests.
Affleck wrote that despite the effectiveness of wearing masks, more proactive steps need to be taken to lower coronavirus infection risk, just like for climate change.
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“Though widespread N95 masking is indisputably the most effective tool for individuals to prevent COVID transmission, masking alone is both more resource-intensive and more reactive than collective interventions like paid sick leave for all workers, universal healthcare, and clean air standards requiring HEPA filtration and far-UVC light44 to kill airborne virus in public spaces,” she argued.
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Affleck concluded her essay by saying, “In the same way that COVID-conscious and disabled people celebrate each chain of transmission broken, climate scientists recognize that each degree of warming we avoid will be a victory. It’s time for everyone who cares about the latter to engage with the people, the methods, and the political commitments that make the former possible.”
Last spring, Garner shared several photos on Instagram of herself in tears during and after Violet’s high school graduation. Violet is Garner and Affleck’s oldest child. “Tell me you have a graduate without telling me you have a graduate,” she wrote in the caption, adding in parentheses: “Bless our hearts.”
“How are we going to make it? What are we going to do?” Garner asked in one video taken on an airplane as she wiped away tears.
Garner also told Southern Living in an interview last year that she has striven to raise her children to be humble despite being born into wealth.
“It’s really important for my kids to see that everyone doesn’t have the lives they see in Los Angeles,” she told the magazine. “That doesn’t reflect the rest of the world. I want them to grow up with the Southern values I had—to look at people when they say hello and to stop and smell the roses. If I could do half as good a job as my mom did, I’d be pretty happy.”
Fox News Digital has reached out to a rep for Garner for comment.
