This article links the workers’ health and the environmental issue, using as references the ecosocial approach, the political ecology and the movement for environmental justice. Each reference detaches a specific dimension: (1) the ecosocial approach emphasizes the dimension of knowledge through the development of integrated assessment and the new role of science in order to surpass simplistic ideologies based on positivism and fragmentation, which ignore the complexity of socio-environmental problems and their uncertainties; (2) the political ecology and the concept of environmental justice discuss the dimension of power, in which socio-environmental problems are understood as consequences of center-peripheries relationships of domination that despair the need of human beings and nature; and finally (3) the movement for environmental justice presents the dimension of action, which is propitiated the consciousness that many socio-environmental problems have their origin in an unfair development model, specially for the most discriminated and poor population. Here we discuss the role developed by the Brazilian Network of Environmental Justice, which can be seen as a strategic example how to face environmental challenges in Latin-American countries as Brazil.
Worker's health; Ecosocial approach; Environmental justice; Political ecology; Environmental health