When March of the Penguins came to local theatres, I didn’t go. I knew I wouldn’t be able to bear it. On Friday night it premiered on the Canadian movie channel. I watched, as best as I could, spending most of it in tears and at times turning away, unable to look.

The movie critics, for the most part, saw it as just a documentary, and while being unwilling to criticize it overall (the cinematography is stunning, and the script is factual and non-moralizing — this is just a simple true story, after all), some of them were annoyed at the ‘anthropomorphizing’ — the mere suggestion that non-human creatures can actually think and feel, and aren’t doing what they do ‘automatically’. I don’t know what planet such people live on, but then there are still some people who believe global warming isn’t man-made, or even that it is not occurring at all. Hell, there are still some people who believe the world is only a few thousand years old and will soon be ‘saved’ by a big funny-looking guy in a beard.

Having read the positive but underwhelming critical reviews, I learned as well that conservatives ‘saw’ the film as a reaffirmation of their values — monogamy, heterosexuality, family above all. As Paul Simon said “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest”.

Those of you who ‘know’ me will know that what I saw in this film was:

• Evidence of the astonishing joy, sensitivity, love, acceptance, appreciation, wisdom, courage and resilience that permeates all life on Earth: These creatures know the real meaning and value of life and how to live more richly and sustainably, and hence better, than we humans have in millennia; and
• Realization of the staggering beauty, wonder and precious value of what we humans are now thoughtlessly and recklessly destroying.

Penguins have been living the same way of life depicted in this film for fifty million years, nearly twenty times as long as our species has been on Earth. They are part of the astonishing diversity and complexity of life that has emerged to be perfect for this strange, vulnerable and hostile planet, to keep it in Sacred Balance. And thanks to our species, this will all be gone in one hundred years or so. All gone, destroyed, extinguished forever. All because we humans, we arrogant monsters, believe that our ‘right’ to breed 6, or 9, or 14 billion rapacious, destructive, thoughtless, unconscious members of our own species trumps the ‘right’ of every other creature on this planet to exist.

In nature there are no ‘rights’ — this is an abstract, human concept, invented to prevent our stressed out, mentally ill, massively excessive numbers from killing each other arbitrarily, and giving us an excuse to exterminate other species and claim ‘personal’ ‘ownership’ of their, of our collective Earth.

In nature there are only responsibilities. That is the unbearable truth of March of the Penguins. That is why I cried all the way through it, why I had to turn away at the gentle, noble lessons that these wondrous, gorgeous creatures show us, try to teach us, with every move, every glance, everything they do.

But we cannot hear them any more. Our human ‘frames’ no longer countenance such truths. It is all too late. This film is not merely a celebration of life in a place of terrible beauty. It is an early memorial to the unbearable truth of what our horrifically irresponsible and insensitivespecies will soon have extinguished.