Essentia Health campus vs. a panel from ‘Ronin’
Essentia Health campus in Duluth on Aug. 4, 2022. Steve Kuchera / Duluth News Tribune
Panel from Frank Miller’s “Ronin” as shown in the Comics Journal.
In the graphic novel Ronin, by Frank Miller, an AI named Virgo grows its organic technology over and through a dystopian New York City. As the story progresses, the city completely transforms. I wondered if I could find a photo of the expanding hospital complex that matched this comic panel.
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For my part I am not necessarily judging the hospital expansionism but more like just saying, this is a force changing the city, the transformation is happening. I am happy to have competing modern expanding hospitals in walking distance of my hillside home. I remain thankful that so many find employment in the unionized hospital system. My personal beef is that Essentia in particular did not build the greenest building possible even with all their money. The info I saw trumpeted the one LEED mark they hit or exceeded, an environmental building measure. Meanwhile, locally-owned non-corporate business Whole Foods Coop, who I am not speaking for, has built two buildings that each fulfill 100% of LEED certification requirements, with much less money at their disposal. The messaging of a giant hospital not being LEED certified is that they care less about the environment than they should, even though their mission is to do no harm. As such any so-called modern hospital must recognize the environmental crisis is real. There is not a single solar panel on the new Essentia building, which gave me the idea that someone should film themselves bringing a solar panel of any size to the hospital and trying to gift it to them. I do not respect large corporations or billionaires being cheap