Jonathan Franzen's new book, Freedom, is earning rave reviews and reaching a mass audience. Even Oprah is bringing it to her book club. I mention this because the protagonist is concerned with a challenging topic that doesn't get enough attention: Population growth.

One of the characters in the book has a bee in his bonnet about world overpopulation, and he points out, rightly, that pretty much every serious problem we have in the world is, if not caused by too many people, certainly aggravated by it. And he's frustrated in the book because it's become kind of a taboo thing, nobody will talk about it, it's the elephant in the room. 

So I wanted to talk about the elephant in the room a little bit, but I wanted to do it in the context of a marriage that is about raising children, and in the context of how incredibly meaningful and central the raising of children, the reproduction of a species, is to our understanding of ourselves. 

And this is part of what I think a novel is supposed to do -- it's supposed to find ways to connect the largest possible social picture with the most intimate, personal, difficult-to-express human stories. 

Following Dot Earth Blog - which I highly recommend - is an excellent way to further educate yourself on population growth. Blogger Andrew Revkin believes by 2050 the human population is expected to reach nine billion, essentially adding two Chinas to the number of people alive today so he examines "efforts to balance human affairs with the planet’s limits." After the jump, check the video with Franzen on the topic.

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