Jessie Scanlon‘s article sets it up perfectly. Valerie Casey (who used to be at frog, now at IDEO) was on her third cross-country flight that month and had just seen An Inconvenient Truth when it hit her. She decided to start doing some research. She came across an albatross carcass which had 1036 pieces of plastic in it. And she learned about giant sections of the open ocean where all the floating plastic in the world seems to congregate. She was suffering from acute apocaphilia (aka exposure to climate porn) and she was having something that sustainability guru Ray Anderson calls the “spear-in-the-heart” moment. Because her slides were so awesome, we’re going to include as many as we can.

She decided to start putting together a plan that positioned designers as the leaders of this movement. Apparently, not all designers felt the same way.

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We were told there was no wireless here in Morgan Auditorium at the Academy of Art but it seems the sustainability gods are providing a miraculous mystery connection, at least for the moment. So, welcome, welcome to Compostmodern, a one-day conference on design and sustainability in San Francisco. That’s Laura Shore from Mohawk and AIGA’s national board talking about some of AIGA’s sustainable policies to open the show.

Already it feels a bit different—all the conference materials (corn and paper, mostly) are compostable, and advisers stationed at various recycling receptacles can counsel you on how to deconstruct the cafe-bought coffee cup you brought in. Also: no water bottles, no swag bags (yay!), and not even any name badges for the participants.

The conference–and a rather major announcement scheduled for this afternoon–has already garnered some buzz. We told you about Allison Arieff‘s post discussing the Designers Accord (the “Kyoto Treaty for design”), and Jessie Scanlon has written a great piece for BusinessWeek, “A New Model for Green Design” that talks to IDEO’s Valerie Casey, Allan Chochinov of Core77 and Ric Grefé from AIGA about why designers had to take charge.