East to West and Back Again
Barnes, a very studious child and young adult, was accepted to the University of Virginia where she completed a B.A. in English and American Studies. As an undergrad she moved to Portland, despite having never visited the city, and worked in an advocacy group called Save Our Wild Salmon Coalition. Portland was clean, the people were polite—even being quiet on public transportation and yielding to cyclists.
For the East Coast native, the West Coast mentality was nice, but almost too nice. “It was so drastically different from where I grew up,” Barnes said.
She said many environmentalists are happy there, but it was not for her. “I actually got a little bored because there are no problems,” she said. “I needed to do something where there was an actual environmental problem.”
With a clearer idea of how she wanted to help the environment, Barnes headed back to the East Coast and enrolled at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies for graduate studies.
She studied water economics, specifically evaluation systems which put a value on nature. Her studies again led her out into the field.
Barnes took her limited Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking ability to the Amazon for four months and Nicaragua for two weeks where she saw up close the destruction of the rainforest. “It was like visiting the worst place in Oklahoma during the depression,” Barnes said.
On one occasion, she was sunburned and bitten so badly by mosquitoes that the locals thought she was diseased.
After her jaunt in the jungle, Barnes graduated and decided to head to New York City. She had been away from her brother, who was about to get married, and felt a need to reconnect. Barnes didn’t have a job, but a friend offered a room, so she moved in.
Like many who move to New York on a whim, her first job was not in the field she had put so much time and effort into studying. She traded research papers for magazine articles, earning a job as a copy editor at New York Magazine.
That led to offers from both Modern Bride Magazine and Men’s Journal. The Men’s Journal gig was for an environmental column, so she took it.
The work was steady, but Barnes still yearned to make a real impact on the environmental issues she cared about and had spent so much time studying.
She met up with Brandon Whitney and Cassie Flynn, former classmates from Yale Forestry School, who were also in New York City. They had all been working to help solve global environmental crisis, but realized the answer was right in front of them.
“All of us were like, this is ridiculous, there are urgent problems now. The U.S. has the largest carbon footprint by far. We don’t actually need to stop other countries from polluting. We actually need to stop our own countries from polluting,” Barnes said.
They had, in all different parts of the world, been trying to solve problems in those areas, but had no connection to the place they were helping. The group felt if they could invest in solving problems at home, not only would it help their area, but others might take up a similar cause in their city or town.
For people living in the suburbs, taking up environmental causes is slightly easier, but doing such things in a place like New York City where space and resources are limited is a whole different game. “The whole idea of refocusing the environmental movement into the urban setting was pretty new. That was a huge reason we felt ioby should be focused into urban settings,” Barnes said.
Despite having full-time jobs, Whitney and Barnes incorporated ioby in 2008. In April 2009 they launched their project unfunded.
By the end of 2009 funding came around and it was time to leave Men’s Journal. “I told them, I was not going to work at this magazine anymore writing feature stories about strong men. I am going to do something nobler,” Barnes said.
