The National Toxic Land/Labor Conservation Service is an innovative new agency dedicated to ending government unaccountability concerning the domestic effects of the American nuclear state. The legacy of secrecy, denial, mis-information, and sacrifice that characterize Cold War government operations requires vigilant detection and continual exposition. To that end, the National TLC Service was founded to carry out the discovery—in perpetuity— of ways to care for lands, attend to labor histories, and explore the linkages between bodies, environments, and exposures.

Co-directed by a public scholar in the humanities, an artist, and an environmental justice advocate, the Service brings rigorous, creative, and justice-oriented thinking to bear on the environmental, human health, and cultural legacy of the Cold War. In our first year in operation, we are working toward the following

  1. Appointing permanent co-directors including a visual, conceptual, or performing artist, a public scholar in the humanities, and an environmental justice activist;
  2. Building a national advisory board of artists, activists, scholars, and writers;
  3. Developing public communications, including a logo, website, brochure, and annual report;
  4. Initiating one collaborative, site-specific cultural program, such as an annual national ball for former nuclear workers, a program to assist people and their descendents in adopting orphaned plutonium-239, or a digital archive of nuclear humor;
  5. Conducting a feasibility study concerning the establishment of either an impossible monument to human radiation testing or the National Cold War Environmental Heritage and Visitor Centers.