When the world seemed upside down during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown and reality seemed displaced, author Ronnie Swire Siegel used her art and photography background to express her feelings and work on a topic dear to her heart: climate change, animals and their habitats, and the ramifications. Ronnie considers her life's work trying to connect children with nature. Her background as a landscape architect and environmental artist has enabled her to see more acutely than most the everyday effects of climate change. By superimposing images of animals from other habitats into her landscape photos from past travels and combining explanatory and fantastical text, she creates a surreal interpretation of what animals could face in a future altered by global warming in her fiction picture book Displaced: A Story About Climate Change and How Displaced Animals Ring the Alarm. As a landscape architect and global citizen, Ronnie is committed to developing and creating nature-based play and learning environments for children and has teamed with educational organizations and municipalities to reinvent traditional play spaces with a more nature-based focus for urban children. Her designs promote learning through the exploration of nature to make sure that the next generation has a love of nature so that they will become better stewards of the environment. She believes that climate change is threatening this healthy connection and without the bond to nature developed early in life, an intention to preserve it will be lost. As an environmental artist, Ronnie has recently completed an Interactive Global Art Project called Carry the EARTH. This project is intended to use shared storytelling to bridge the gaps between countries, cultures, ages, economic divides, and unite people with one common thread-- our home planet is a beautiful and fragile place-a globe we all share, along with the responsibility to protect it. It is Ronnie's hope to communicate that our many small actions, together, can bring about huge change. Her children's book Displaced is an extension of her life's work. Ronnie received a BA in Fine Arts and Natural Sciences from Colgate University, and later earned her Masters in Landscape Architecture from University of Pennsylvania. When she isn't writing thought-provoking books for children, Ronnie enjoys exploring the world and nature, hiking, gardening, photography, multimedia artwork, and landscape design. She lives with her husband and beagle in the chaparral hills above Los Angeles. Displaced is her debut children's book.
