(Reprinted from the Summer 1998 Arlington Environment)

We occasionally run across the ghost of ACE past. “Litter down 35% in Arlington County!” proclaims a 1979 press release. That’s a pretty impressive achievement for a one-year- old organization. Then there are those mysterious adopt-a-spot signs around Cherrydale. Who were those Arlingtonians and where are they now?

ACE history hasn’t been well kept, sad to say, but we couldn’t let out twentieth anniversary go by without digging into the files and old photos for the benefit of our readers. More than interesting anecdotes and bad fashion, they reveal an organization that has evolved through several changes of leadership and changing notions of what’s “green” and what’s not.

One might assume from our name that ACE began as a stirring among the grassroots, with citizens rising up to reclaim their community from polluters and non-responsive bureaucrats. Hardly. You’d be closer to the truth by saying that ACE was started by local government in response to a national corporate public relations campaign. Specifically, ACE was founded by the Arlington Department of Public Works as a charter Clean Community System of the organization Keep America Beautiful.

You remember Keep America Beautiful. They made those unforgetable anti-litter ads featuring the “crying Indian,” one of the most successful PSA campaigns of all time. Many of today’s environmentalists remember crying along with the old guy in the middle of the Partridge Family. Never mind that the ads never showed a bottle or can among the litter, and the message, “People cause pollution, people can do something about it,” was crafted to divert the public from pointing fingers at industry. More on that later.

In 1978, Henry (Hank) Hulme, who as Director of Public Works was the real founder of ACE, convinced the County Board that a citizen-led group teaching litter prevention would actually save the county money. He hired ACE’s first Executive Coordinator, Gere McCall, whom he describes as “a very dynamic individual.”

In the first year ACE partnered with 7-11 stores to promote “Keep Arlington Beautiful Week” and organized an “ACE Race Against Litter.” ACE worked with business and civic associations to organize cleanups and beautification projects. Posters and TV campaigns produced by the state government were widely distributed. Lester Litter and Captain Cleanup showed up at public events and got people yucking it up over cleaning up.

Before long, Ace was winning awards from Keep America Beautiful. By 1980 ACE was claiming to have reduced litter in the county by 60 percent. However incredible that may sound, it was based on an ostensibly scientific photographic sampling of Arlington streets and properties.

In addition to dramatically reducing litter, Hulme says, ACE established a public constituency for Public Works programs. Furthermore, it tapped into the energy of the environmental movement and provided a rallying point around which neighborhoods came together.

“The educational and civic approach was a natural for Arlington,” says Hulme. As one report says, “Blaming the County or business, etc. is being redirected to self responsibility and cooperation in solving waste problems.” Or as Hulme puts it, “You aren’t a nerd if you go out and sweep the gutter in front of your house.”

By the end of the 1980s, the public was clamoring for recycling. New ACE board members wanted the organization to address issues besides litter. After the departure of McCall in 1989 the board brought on Edward (Ned) Ruhe as Executive Coordinator. A former student activist fresh from a stint with Greenpeace, Ruhe’s credentials were impeccably green. So was the Robin Hood outfit that he wore to schools, cleanups, and the occasional public hearing, presumably to underscore our relationship with the creatures of the forest.

With Ruhe’s charismatic leadership, ACE paved the way for bringing recycling to Arlington. ACE started a recycling drop-off facility in partnership with the Uncommon Market. As the county got its residential recycling program going, ACE organized an Adopt-a-Business program which trained 100 volunteers to help businesses set up voluntary recycling programs. Also during the “Ned era,” ACE began a series of annual environmental awards.

Ruhe’s offhand management style and controversial stances eventually ran ACE afoul of our county benefactors. In 1993, the board hired Steve Coffee, a former restaurateur who had shifted gears into a masters degree in environmental planning and a brief stint with a population advocacy group in D.C.

While Coffee (who, in the spirit of full disclosure, is writing this history) settled in, the ACE board began reevaluating its relationship with Keep America Beautiful. KAB had been trashed in the environmental press, where it was characterized as an industry front group. In the 1970s, several organizations including the Sierra Club, the Garden Club of America, and the Environmental Protection Agency, dropped off KAB’s advisory board in protest of its lobbying against deposit legislation. That left on the panel representatives of companies which make, bag, haul, or dispose of garbage.

The bottle bill had become a sort of litmus test. KAB’s president was said to have characterized supporters of deposit legislation as “communists.” Among environmentalists, no one against the bottle bill could be considered green. Some of ACE’s board members had been involved in the effort to pass a bottle bill in D.C. and had been defeated by a nasty, race-tinged, $2.3 million campaign by many of the same companies which direct KAB.

ACE disaffiliated from KAB, or got kicked out, depending on whose version of history you accept. But for the ideology, ACE remains a nonpolitical, government supported educational organization that focuses heavily on litter and works comfortably with business. In a county with “good” government and little industry, people-caused pollution is exactly what most needs to be addressed.

And somehow, there’s still all that litter around. Hulme, who still lives in Arlington, says that the litter problem has gotten worse in recent years, but is not nearly as bad as it was before ACE began.

The rest, as they say, is history. The last few years have been characterized by organizational stability and growth in programs. Notable accomplishments include the 1995 Four Mile Run Ecofest, the Rediscovering the Schoolyard program, and participation in the Multicultural Institute’s National Days festivals. Well, we could go on, but what’s more interesting is what the future will bring. ACE has exciting projects on the launch pad, which are mentioned elsewhere in the newsletter.