Violet Affleck is a student at Yale University and a paper she wrote was made public in the college's Global Health Review paper.
The 19-year-old college freshman and daughter of Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck explained that she got into an argument with her mom during the January 2025 Los Angeles fires.
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She began, "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. 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 added, "The crisis was acute, a burst of bad luck. It had come from a combination of high winds and low rains - what, my little brother asked, did global warming have to do with the speed of the wind? Outside, people wandered, faces covered by N95s. 'This feels like COVID,' said one wild-eyed woman clutching two leashed Yorkies. 'We're all in masks.'"
Violet continued, "Hopefully, most of us understand the climate crisis better than my little brother - we know, for instance, that it's existential and accelerating, meaning the danger to places like LA will only increase as the planet heats1,2. And we know that it's anthropogenic, 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 crops3. But our bewildered response to crises like the LA fires tell us we may still be accustomed to addressing the climate crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic: as a question of how fast we can get back around to pretending like the problem is gone."
"The climate crisis requires no changes to our consumption patterns until our major cities burn, at which point the solution is to consume more," she continued. She also brought up COVID in her essay, which you can read in full here.
This is not the first time Violet's stances have become public. Last summer, she made a speech at a Los Angeles Board of Supervisors meeting about mask mandates, and revealed she had suffered from a post-viral condition in 2019.