“Her law degree may not be real… but she did go to Stanford for a bit.”
Violet Affleck had a few things to say about the wildfires that swept through Los Angeles in January.
The 19-year-old daughter of actors Ben Affleck, 52, and Jennifer Garner, 53, recently published an academic paper in the Global Health Review that explored the United States’ response to the tragedy.
In her opening paragraph, she recalled a disagreement she had with her mother regarding the fires.
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“I spent the January fires in Los Angeles arguing with my mother in a hotel room,” she began the essay, published May 18.
According to Violet Affleck, a freshman at Yale University, Garner was “shell-shocked” and “astonished” at the destruction the wildfires caused in the Los Angeles area, where Garner raises her three kids.
The “Daredevil” actress, who shares Violet, Seraphina, 16, and Samuel, 13 with Affleck, has lived in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood for the past 25 years, per USA Today.
“I was surprised at her surprise,” Violet Affleck admitted in the essay.
“As a lifelong Angelena and climate-literate member of generation Z, my question had not been whether the Palisades would burn but when,” she added of the wildfires.
Southern California was rocked in January by a string of 14 wildfires that killed at least 30 people and destroyed more than 18,000 structures and tens of thousands of acres of land, per NBC News.
The Palisades and Eaton wildfires are the second and third most destructive fires in state history, per Cal Fire.
Garner had previously opened up about losing a friend and her family’s church to the wildfires.
In a January interview with MSNBC’s Katy Tur, Garner admitted to feeling a wave of survivor’s guilt.
"I feel almost guilty walking through my house," she told Tur. "You know, what can I do? How can I help? What can I offer? What do I have to offer with these hands and these walls and the safety that I have?"
Violet Affleck felt alone in her analysis of what was happening
In her May 18 essay, Violet Affleck wrote about feeling surprised at everyone else’s reaction to the fires.
“As I chatted with adults in the hotel where we’d gone to escape the smoke,” she wrote, “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. The crisis was acute, a burst of bad luck,” she explained.
Even her younger brother questioned her position that the fires were less a result of wind and more a result of global warming.
“What, my little brother asked, did global warming have to do with the speed of the wind?” Violet Affleck wrote, referring to the combination of high winds and low rains that sparked the fires.
The first-year student went on to compare the United States’ response to the wildfires to its response to the COVID-19 pandemic — and lack of response to the ongoing bird flu crisis.
“The climate crisis requires no changes to our consumption patterns until our major cities burn,” Violet Affleck argues. “At which point the solution is to consume more.”
She likened that idea to Long COVID not being a problem “until we can find no other explanation for why millions of people are unable to work” and “school performance and children’s health decline in unison.”
“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,” she adds.
Instead of waiting for these issues to become a problem, Violet Affleck offers a different approach.
“We can ‘follow the science’ even when it scares us, instead of insisting that ‘we have to live our lives’ until those lives go up in flames,” she writes.
“Adopting a pacing strategy towards the climate crisis then means not only celebrating every potential catastrophe we avoid but also embracing the ways in which each one could have been worse,” she wrote.
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“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,” she concluded.
