About Second Growth

Second Growth is a research organization that documents what happens to a place's people and economy when the single industry that organized it exits — plant closures, resource depletion, and the long aftermath of economic consolidation.

We work from primary data and named sources. Where the existing record has gaps, we commission or conduct original research to close them. Our goal is a public, checkable evidence record — not an advocacy narrative — that researchers, agencies, and the communities affected can all work from.

Our name

"Second growth" is a real forestry term: the regrowth that follows logging or fire, often different and more diverse than what grew there first. We chose it because it describes what we're actually studying — what comes after a single, dominant system exits — without assuming in advance what that should look like.

Current work

Our current work is the methodology and evidence base for our first case study: California's Central Valley, where decades of commodity-agriculture and food-processing consolidation have displaced the people who did the work of growing and processing it.