They call it a ghost forest.
Ghosts can be scary, or they can be comforting ancestors.
Spirits give us a glimpse into the past and the future, perturb and connect us. Throughout North America, forests as deeply rooted as cultures, as tall as family trees, are becoming ghosts.
Second Growth immerses audiences in the experiences of individuals and communities who are watching their trees become phantoms. Mourning. Displacement. Adaptation. Resistance. Regrowth.
Second Growth invites viewers to grapple with what we, as a global community, can learn from the way people and landscapes respond to such dramatic, ecological changes as the total loss of forest types and the ways of being that evolved with them. Second Growth hews close to what trees embody: rootedness, continuity, respect for elders. In these stories, people and trees work for a new sense of stasis, a way to balance and belong.
How does a forester honor a dead forest? How do oak-basket weavers carry their traditions into a future without oaks? How does an indigenous community navigate open water that used to be a forested wetland where their ancestors are buried? And, how do cultures in historically treeless landscapes integrate forests into their ways of knowing as tree lines advance in latitude?
These are the existential and tangible challenges Second Growth shares through transdisciplinary storytelling. Second Growth creators weave 360-degree, immersive imagery, science journalism, and scientific illustration to build an immersive environment: audiences find themselves in the middle of ghost forests, in young forests, in changing forests.
Look, listen, grieve, and hope alongside people processing loss and searching for a future while facing irrevocable change.