Sara Sneath likes to be on the front line of environmental issues, and her respect for Mother Nature runs deep. Those are two reasons why she took a break from journalism in 2018 and spent three straight months living out in the elements, including several nights hunkered down in a bed of snow in the dead of winter.
“When I first came back, I was feral, I grappled with ‘how do you live in houses, how do you sit on couches?’” says Sneath of her trek into the wild with the National Outdoor Leadership School. “I was told that it would be difficult to transition back to my former life, and that was true.”
An environment reporter for NOLA.com and former Marine, Sneath embraces challenges head on. “I think I’ve lived my whole life that way,” she says.
In fact, as she prepared to rappel off an 80-foot perilous cliff during her stint in the great outdoors, she rationalized, “I was about to do something that scared me. That alone seemed like a good enough reason to do it.”
Sneath earned degrees in journalism and sociology from the University of Kansas. She’s reported for the Willamette Week in Portland, Oregon, and the Victoria Advocate in Texas where she won four Associated Press awards for her coverage of oil, water and coastal issues.
In an effort to gain a better understanding of the scientific findings associated with the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Sneath attended Metcalf Institute’s 2014 Oil Spill Science Seminar for Journalists in Mobile, Alabama. “Two months after the workshop there was another oil spill on the Gulf coast,” says Sneath. “I used a lot of the information I learned in the Metcalf workshop, and that information is still relevant today.”
Sneath joined The Times-Picayune’s coastal environment team led by award-winning journalist and Metcalf Annual Science Immersion Workshop alumnus Mark Schleifstein, in 2017. “It was such an honor to work with Mark in New Orleans,” says Sneath. “That was a dream of mine!” A dream followed by a wake-up call two years later when The Times-Picayune merged with The New Orleans Advocate, resulting in massive layoffs. Fortunately, Sneath and the entire environment team stayed intact at the Advocate after the merger.
Sneath enjoys covering stories focused on endangered species and the people who are most impacted by environmental challenges, including people living in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. “These people are often on the frontlines of environmental issues,” she says. “And it’s important that we pay attention.”
Sneath hopes to write more in-depth, long-form environmental stories in the near future. She’d also like to use her new survival skills to convince a climate scientist to take her into the field “As environmental reporters we’re constantly trying to convince scientists that we’re not liabilities in the field,” says Sneath. “I feel like I can say ‘I’m not a liability, I can build a snow fort and live in it.’ I really want to be on the front line of these issues and I hope the wilderness course helps me get there.”