Violet Affleck Had A Fight With Mom Jennifer Garner Over Climate Change
She highlighted a frustrating generational divide.
Violet Affleck opened up about a tense moment with her famous mother in a new essay. The Yale freshman recently published an academic argument about the global climate crisis, revealing in her intro that she had a disagreement with her mom, Jennifer Garner, earlier in 2025 about the cause of the Los Angeles wildfires.
“I spent the January fires in Los Angeles arguing with my mother in a hotel room,” Affleck wrote as the opening line of her essay, which was published on May 18 in the Yale Global Health Review. “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.”
Affleck added that her younger brother (13-year-old Sam) also challenged her views on the environmental crisis. “What, my little brother asked, did global warming have to do with the speed of the wind?,” Affleck wrote. “Hopefully, most of us understand the climate crisis better than my little brother.”
In her paper, Affleck argued that society and the government should treat the climate crisis with the same urgency and strategy that was implemented in mitigating the 2020 COVID outbreak. She pointed to other conversations she had with Los Angeles natives during the wildfires that were similar to her exchanges with her mom and brother, highlighting her frustration with adults remarking on “how tragically odd the whole situation had been.”
“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,” Affleck wrote.
Affleck is about to conclude her first year at Yale University after enrolling as a freshman in fall 2024. While her major is not publicly known, it’s likely she will focus on public health studies, given her clear interest in the topic. Last summer, Affleck made a passionate speech against mask bans in Los Angeles in front of the County Board of Supervisors.
