Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck better not be traveling on carbon-emitting private jets, and the ex-spouses might want to re-think their need to live in massively-sized houses, because their oldest daughter, Violet Affleck, has fashioned herself into a climate justice warrior who has published an essay calling out the environmental harm caused by the privileged lifestyle in which she was raised.

Related Articles

Jim Morrison bust stolen from Doors singer’s Paris grave in the ‘80s has finally been recovered

Blake Lively’s ‘pro-slavery’ company was a ‘toxic’ workplace: report

George Wendt dies at 76; actor played fan favorite Norm Peterson on ‘Cheers’

King Charles rebuffs Prince Harry by bonding with David Beckham

When’s the last time Nicole Kidman didn’t wear a wig in public?

The 19-year-old Yale University student writes about the devastating Los Angeles fires in January, which forced her mother and two younger siblings to evacuate from their Pacific Palisades home. The essay, published in an undergraduate campus publication, opens with Violet Affleck describing how she was holed up in a hotel, arguing with her mother about the causes and “the scale of the destruction.”

“She was shell-shocked, astonished at the scale of destruction in the neighborhood where she raised myself and my siblings,” Violet Affleck writes in The Yale Global Health Review. “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.”

Violet Affleck expressed further dismay in talking to other presumably well-heeled evacuees at the hotel who struck her as ignorant about the “existential and accelerating” climate crisis.

“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 wrote. She said they blamed the crisis on “bad luck,” while her younger brother, Samuel, couldn’t understand what global warming had to do with the hurricane-force winds and dry topography that fueled the flames after the Palisades Fire broke out in the Santa Monica Mountains on Jan. 7.

Violet Affleck’s essay got headlines in the entertainment media Wednesday because she wrote about arguing with her famous mother. But the college student is trying to make larger points, including how today’s climate crisis is driven “by unsustainable consumption patterns concentrated among the wealthiest citizens of the wealthiest countries.”

Yes, this daughter of rich and famous movie stars is turning the mirror on her own privileged upbringing. It has been established that wealthy people have a higher carbon footprint than everyone else. The world’s wealthiest 10% are responsible for two thirds of observed global warming since 1990, and for the resulting increases in climate extremes such as heatwaves and droughts, according to a 2005 study in Nature Climate Change.

But inevitably, Violet Affleck has invited criticism that she’s an ungrateful, insufferable, entitled nepo baby whose family could at least afford a nice hotel room in which to shelter during the disaster. Also, neither of her parents’ homes burned down in the fire. Others weren’t so lucky. The Palisades Fire destroyed entire neighborhoods, killed 12 people and destroyed more than 6,800 homes and other structures before it was fully contained weeks later.

But other people online praised Violet Affleck. “She’s got a good head on her shoulders,” one person wrote in the comments section of a People magazine article about her essay. “I love hearing when kids care about the world and want to be proactive. Good on her! Her Mom must be very proud.”

In her essay, Violet Affect argues that humans tend to ignore looming crises until they “explode” into deadly, full-scale disasters. She also despairs of the way that U.S. society tends to declare crises over too soon, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Our bewildered response to crises like the L.A. 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,” she writes. She also lists ways that the threat of COVID-19 continues, noting that the vaccine doesn’t stop transmission of the virus, only the severity of the infection, and that people continue to die from COVID or suffer the effects of long COVID.

But when it comes to people with long COVID and other chronic illnesses, Violet Affleck said they also offer a model for how the American public could address looming crises like climate change. In fact, her essay is titled, “A Chronically Ill Earth: COVID Organizing as a Model Climate Response in Los Angeles.”

Instead of expecting “a frame of total recovery,” people with chronic illnesses and disabilities look to manage their conditions and “to celebrate the life-changing benefits of even tiny improvements,” she writes.

Here, Violet Affleck seems to be speaking from personal experience. She made news last summer when she appeared before her hometown Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and revealed that she had some kind of chronic illness. Known for wearing masks in public, she also said that she had contracted a “post-viral,” long-COVID-like condition in 2019, as she made a brief speech about how masks should continue to be compulsory in Los Angeles hospitals “to confront the long COVID crisis.”

As for addressing climate change, Violet Affect explains that it can’t be reversed but that it can be slowed and that people should do what they can to nudge environmental trends in that direction. “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 said. She also said that, as “COVID-conscious” people and disabled people “celebrate each chain of transmission broken,” climate scientists can recognize that “each degree of warming we avoid will be a victory.” she also said.