Violet Affleck is detailing a month of arguments she had with her famous mother Jennifer Garner while they were cooped up in a hotel room, displaced by the Los Angeles wildfires in January.
The eldest child of the “13 Going on 30” star and Ben Affleck recalled the disagreement in an academic research paper published in Yale University’s Global Health Review earlier this week, titled“A Chronically Ill Earth: COVID Organizing as a Model Climate Response in Los Angeles.”
She candidly notes … “I spent the January fires in Los Angeles arguing with my mother in a hotel room.” She describes her mom as “shell-shocked, astonished at the scale of destruction in the neighborhood where she raised” her kids — but to Violet, there was no need to be surprised at all.
She writes … “As a lifelong Angelena and climate-literate member of generation Z, my question had not been whether the Palisades would burn but when.”
It wasn’t just Violet and her mother at odds — she details her bewilderment about the general consensus among adults she spoke to that the entire situation was so “tragically odd” and a “burst of bad luck.”
lacounty.gov
She also notes they were more concerned about how long it would take to rebuild and the high costs that would come along with it, seemingly ignoring any underlying concerns.
Violet even called out her 13-year-old brother Samuel for questioning her worry about global warming, recalling him asking … “‘Did global warming have to do with the speed of the wind?'”
She then quips … “Hopefully, most of us understand the climate crisis better than my little brother.”
TMZ.com
Putting her worry about climate change front and center, she later urges that climate change is “existential and accelerating” and “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 crops.”
Violet concludes her paper by comparing public health responses to climate disasters and airborne disease transmission, noting it seems there is an overarching yearning to always return to normalcy — which she says is impossible, as exemplified bythe ongoing threat of COVID-19, which she has previously spoken about.
MSNBC
She calls people concerned about the climate to “engage with the people, the methods, and the political commitments” to get the conversation started — and methods moving — on how to alleviate global warming, and therefore, more disasters as devastating as the L.A. wildfires.
