FERN Board

Nat Brown is a former Senior Software Architect at Microsoft where he had also served as a programmer and manager, eventually launching the XBox console project. Since leaving Microsoft he has worked for, launched, and sold several software startups. Nat is currently an Engineering Manager at Apple, Inc.

Samuel Fromartz is a co-founder and an Editor-at-Large at FERN. He is FERN’s founding Editor-in-Chief, a position he held until 2023. He is a veteran journalist who focuses on the intersection of the environment, food and sustainable business. He began his career at Reuters news agency in the mid-1980s, working as a correspondent in Washington and as deputy editor for the Reuters Business Report in New York. Subsequently, his articles have appeared in Inc., Fortune, BusinessWeek, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic magazine’s Life channel, among other publications. He is the author of “Organic Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew” (Harcourt, 2006) about the evolution of the organic foods industry. His most recent book is “In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker’s Odyssey” (Viking, 2014), a memoir that explores bakers, grains and bread. He lives in Washington, D.C. and blogs at ChewsWise.com.

Sarena Snider is a multimedia journalist, documentary photographer, and graduate of Columbia Journalism School. Over the past 10 years, she has worked as a multimedia producer focused on public interest stories.  She co-produced the Sovereign podcast, featured on Apple Podcasts in 2021, which investigated a legal agreement and subsequent battle between native tribes and the state of Maine. She is currently working on a documentary about plastic. She began her career at National Geographic Television, and served as a producer and researcher for several feature-length, theatrically distributed documentaries. She also managed social media for the feature documentary Eating Animals during its impact campaign.

Susan West was executive editor of FERN from 2011 to 2015. As a principal of West Gold Editorial consulting, she has helped launch magazines such as Dwell and advised publications and websites from Cooking Light to WebMD. She co-founded Health magazine, which won four National Magazine Awards during her tenure. She was the founding editor in chief of the travel magazine AFAR and executive editor of Smithsonian magazine.