Becoming a LEED AP has been all the rage these past few years, and everywhere you look, you now see those string of letters on EVERYONE's email signatures. The US may not be number one when it comes to worldwide rankings of greenness, but with all the hype out there in our homeland, you'd think that everyone and their mom's a LEED AP by now. This really got me wondering exactly how many people really do get to tack on a million more letters of prestige after their signatures.
According to GBCI's tally on LEED professionals, the US boasts a whopping 82,019 people with 24,951 being architects (it was not specified if these were licensed individuals or not, but for now, let's just assume so). Wow, that's a lot of architects, right? Or is it? NCARB's list from 2011 counted a total of 104,301 individually registered architects in the country (not counting reciprocities) which makes only 24% of us 'marketably' green. Not to say that those other 76% don't practice responsible design, but should we be pushing this type of standardized education harder since it IS our products that guzzle up a huge chunck of today's energy consumption? Or is there some other way besides passing the LEED exam to show that we actually do know our stuff without having to pay $100s of dollars to another organization? I don't know if there's any clear answer on this one, but the numbers do at least show that LEED is nowhere near slowing down. For the amount of gripes about the system, at least it's moving us in a more positive direction.
Below you will see a diagram showing the total number of architects in the States, one leaf for every 1000 individuals with only about a quarter being a LEED professional of some sort. What do you think? Do more of us architects need to be 'green leaves'? (and no, I'm not alluding that all non-LEED people are 'dead' leaves....it's just a fun tribute to fall, ha). Or does it really make a different in our industry?
And so you might ask, ok, so what about all those other leaves underneath the pile that we can't see.....well it's obvious, right? there are no other leaves, just a guy and his dogs hanging out in the shadows. Random, of course. This whole blog isn't going to be completely serious number crunching material at every post : )
According to GBCI's tally on LEED professionals, the US boasts a whopping 82,019 people with 24,951 being architects (it was not specified if these were licensed individuals or not, but for now, let's just assume so). Wow, that's a lot of architects, right? Or is it? NCARB's list from 2011 counted a total of 104,301 individually registered architects in the country (not counting reciprocities) which makes only 24% of us 'marketably' green. Not to say that those other 76% don't practice responsible design, but should we be pushing this type of standardized education harder since it IS our products that guzzle up a huge chunck of today's energy consumption? Or is there some other way besides passing the LEED exam to show that we actually do know our stuff without having to pay $100s of dollars to another organization? I don't know if there's any clear answer on this one, but the numbers do at least show that LEED is nowhere near slowing down. For the amount of gripes about the system, at least it's moving us in a more positive direction.
Below you will see a diagram showing the total number of architects in the States, one leaf for every 1000 individuals with only about a quarter being a LEED professional of some sort. What do you think? Do more of us architects need to be 'green leaves'? (and no, I'm not alluding that all non-LEED people are 'dead' leaves....it's just a fun tribute to fall, ha). Or does it really make a different in our industry?
And so you might ask, ok, so what about all those other leaves underneath the pile that we can't see.....well it's obvious, right? there are no other leaves, just a guy and his dogs hanging out in the shadows. Random, of course. This whole blog isn't going to be completely serious number crunching material at every post : )
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