The casual use of marijuana is becoming increasingly accepted, or at least tolerated, in the United States. According to The San Francisco Chronicle, 100 million Americans have used weed, with 15 million smoking in the last month and two million more people trying it each year. According to The New York Times, citing Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron, Americans spend about $25 billion a year on weed. Medical marijuana has created what amounts to the legalization of weed in 14 states so far, including California. Fortune magazine calls it “the greening of America.”

SOME GOOD NEWS BUBBLES UP FROM THE BOTTOM: Things have gone well for BP and the Gulf of Mexico in the last week, relatively speaking. In spite of the challenge of working with remote-operated vehicles (ROVs) in harsh conditions at 5,000 feet below sea level, on Monday BP engineers managed to attach a new sealing cap to a well that has spewed millions of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

SHINING UP THE SHEEN: Salon.com columnist/blogger Glenn Greenwald is someone that I both admire and despise. His fanatical devotion to ideals of transparency and the rule of law are inspiring, if his level of dedication is sometimes annoying. He’s the kind of guy whose politics are rooted firmly in his ideals—Greenwald is like some sort of rock that can’t be eroded, and the nation’s politics move around him like the sea. He spent much of the last decade beating up on the George W. Bush administration for abuses of constitutional power and transparency, and it appears that he will be spending the first part of this decade treating the Barack Obama administration with a similar level of contempt for committing the same trespasses.

“I was contacted several weeks ago by a firm we’ve worked with out of Birmingham, indicating that BP needed help with communications with local government entities, understanding how things worked in south Alabama, and facilitating accessibility to the claims process,” Perkins said.

We all wonder if it will ever stop. To bum us out even more as we begin our annual trudge through another long, nasty, brutish Alabama summer, word came late last week from some of them pointy-headed scientists working for the federal government that even more petroleum has spilled into the Gulf than we thought.

SIX F**KING WEEKS: As the ongoing soap opera in the Gulf of Mexico became more and more of a reality show, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced Tuesday in New Orleans that he has launched a criminal investigation of the events surrounding the April 20 Deepwater Horizon.

Adam Snyder, executive director of Conservation Alabama, has provided Birmingham Weekly with regular updates regarding the status of bills related to the environment during the current session of the

ANNOUNCEMENT: Birmingham-Southern College has made a decision to postpone the BSC portion of the Green Weekend events scheduled this weekend to May 16. The Whole Foods Film Festival will still go o

Churchman, executive director of the Alabama Environmental Council (AEC), offers this Earth Day message, the latest in a series of articles written for Birmingham Weekly by area environmental activist

Alabama is home to dozens of environmental and conservation organizations. If you are part of an environmental group that we failed to include, write to jesse@bhamweekly.com with the subject line “Gre