Welcome to Rollo's farm - our future?
Once Upon a Time in Knoxville uplifts us with the tale of recycling visionary Rollo Sullivan. Rollo hits us with a vision of the resources collapse that awaits us. But where other eco-warriors preach and bore, Rollo revives us with a tableau of fainting goats, talking monkeys and spiritual trash dumps. He's created a paradise out of garbage, and he wants to show us not just how we can live, but how we will be living in the not too distant future. He shows us his brave new world with great humor, but his clear-thinking foresight will stay with you long after the lights have come up.—Fugue State Films
Rollo rents out homemade houses made out of trash and discarded materials. The community he's created lives a simple, sustainable, sufficient third world lifestyle by choice, and is fulfilled doing so. But they are in opposition to the city they live in, and their community is surrounded by the environmental chaos that the American lifestyle has wrought. They see their lifestyle as the way for everyone to live. They also say they show what the future will be like when declining resources narrow the gap between America and the Third World and force Americans to lower drastically their standard of living.
Rollo bought a farm to live the hippie dream, but realized that it wouldn't support him and his family. Therefore he built houses to rent out from discarded materials that he scavenged. He, his family and his tenants live life in what he defines as a third world way, and are happy to get by with almost nothing. They grow food, refine bio-diesel, generate hot water from the sun, use outhouses. But some may find his ideas uncomfortable. He thinks communities scavenging on landfill dumps is good.
Rollo sees his way of life as the way of life of the future. The farm is an oasis of efficiency and reuse, but their efforts are dwarfed by the wastefulness and profligacy of the city around them. The farm is surrounded by land devastated by the American way of life, including a nuclear waste dump from the 1940s. This America next door is clearly unsustainable.
After a lifetime of reuse, he thinks conventional recycling only enables corporations to produce more trash, and he believes America has to collapse before it can be saved. And if it does, many Americans may come to live like Rollo. And if they do, they will find that Rollo's lifestyle, far from being limited or poor, is fulfilling and satisfying.
