Violet Affleck — the 19-year-old daughter of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner — enrolled at Yale last fall, and it looks like her freshman year has already been quite productive. This week, she published an article on COVID and the climate crisis in the Yale Global Health Review, an undergraduate publication covering topics in health.
Titled “A Chronically Ill Earth: COVID Organizing as a Model Climate Response in Los Angeles,” the piece opens with Violet recounting an argument with her mother amid the L.A. wildfires (a detail tabloids were quick to pick up on). “She was shell-shocked, astonished at the scale of destruction in the neighborhood where she raised myself and my siblings,” Violet writes. “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.”
What follows is a remarkably thoughtful freshman essay musing on the COVID pandemic, the climate crisis, and the unsettling parallels between the two, calling on readers to reject “eugenicist logic” and “center disability justice” to protect the most vulnerable. “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.
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Violet’s apparent interest in public health became a topic of discussion last spring, when she was photographed carrying The Viral Underclass, Steven Thrasher’s 2022 book about health inequities. She has frequently been seen masking up while out in public, and in July, she appeared at an L.A. city board meeting where she spoke out against a proposed mask ban, sharing that she contracted a “post-viral condition” in 2019. “I’m okay now, but I saw firsthand that medicine does not always have the answers to the consequences of even minor viruses,” she said, noting that many people are afflicted with long COVID. “The county must oppose mask bans for any reason. They do not keep us safer. They make vulnerable members of our community less safe and make everyone less able to participate in Los Angeles together.”
