Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

This article presents the view health area professionals and students have concerning the interface between health and the environment. It is a qualitative, descriptive study undertaken with different social players that are part of the vocational training process in the health care area in a municipality in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The data were collected through a semistructured interview comprising gui-ding questions on the study subject and carried out among hospital workers, nurses, health care professors and students, and community health agents. Each subproject was analyzed individually based on the content analysis framework. The results show that the subjects have dichotomous views on the environment and acknowledge the adverse effects of the current environmental crisis, claiming that human beings are the main cause of it. The study subjects understand that there is a narrow interface between health and the environment and that the economically less privileged populations are those most affected by environmental damage. It is concluded that deepening the debate on the subject in the process of providing training and professional practice in health is fundamental in order to seek effective socioenvironmental responsibility among the social players involved in the sector.

The article is based on reflections coming from research done on the multiple possibilities of 'practical' environmental education, taking, as starting point, a study on ethnobotany that sought to get to know and value popular knowledge about plants in rural districts of the city of Uberlândia, state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The survey was conducted among children, youth, and people from the community of the districts of Tapuirama and Cruzeiro of Peixotos and used various media languages. Different methodological approaches were used in the course of the investigation in an attempt to adjust to the reality of each district. The data were collected using various visual media, such as photography and video. These tools were present in the different workshops held over the course of the research project; during the last one, there was the collective production of the documentary titled Causos do Cerrado (Stories of Savannah). The study brought interaction between local (the tradition of the folk knowledge on plants) and global (technological resources employed in media production).

This article discusses the health and en-vironmental concepts of community health agents (CHAs) working in two riverside communities in the Ilhéus-Itabuna axis, in southern Bahia, Brazil, and their health promotion activities focused on the en-vironment. Semi-structured interviews carried out among 14 CHAs were analyzed using the collective subject discourse technique proposed by Lefèvre and Lefèvre (2005). In their discourses, the CHAs proved to have a broad view of health (quality of life and rights) and related the environment to the territory, although they consider this as the place where people live. They also relate health to environmental improvements, and although they live and work in a territory where there are serious environmental issues, they undertake environment-related activities only occasionally and individually. From this perspective, reorienting the work process, the CHAs show they are able to create new forms of relationship between the environment and health. Leveraging these players, who live on the scene of the tension of the several territories they transit in, valuing their knowledge and their experience of (in) the environment where they live or work, can be the first step taken toward change, with the reorientation of the health practices and of the health care model.

This article examines the nature and implications of the socalled Local Development (LD). To this end, in view of the also socalled Economic Development (ED), as well as of the structural transformations operated in contemporary capitalism, it converses with themes such as 'productive structures and spaces' and 'State and scalar praxis,' showing the appropriation the liberals have made of them geared to claim a certain perspective - with hegemonic pretensions -, namely the absence of paths for corporate development that could be alternative to LD. The author also argues that the proclaimed modesty of the LD supporters does not stand when submitted to more serious analyses, nor does its also proclaimed progressive nature, since this now resurgent practice, at the end of the day, is one of the faces of today's internationalization of capital. The author also argues that ED affirmed itself historically with the same exegetical and hegemonic pretensions, though from those supporting ED it gets just as much criticism for its virtues as actually for its defects. Finally, the article provocatively asks whether the old developmentalism would be the possible resistance (and not LD), or whether it would be appropriate to re-invoke some truly insurgent alternative (?).

This article addresses the discussion concerning the risks posed by manufactured nanoparticles held during regional meetings in Latin America and the Caribbean by the SAICM (Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management/Enfoque Estratégico para la Gestión de Productos Químicos a Nivel Internacional). It contextualizes this discussion by overviewing the development of nanotechnology in the region and the scientific evidence available on the risks brought about by nanotechnology. It proposes an approach to identify the players that should be involved in the discussion and in risk management based on the nanoparticles' life cycle. The article also proposes a few of the conditions needed to encourage the responsible development of nanotechnology from sectors such as the SAICM, and brings into the discussion the eight relevant items from over a hundred environmental organizations and workers under the supervision of nanotechnologies and nanomaterials.

Based on the workforce overexploitation category, formulated in the context of the Marxist Theory of Dependence, we critique the thesis that Brazil is becoming 'a middle class nation' and state that a substantial contingent of what has been named the 'new middle class' is, in fact, one of workers - and their families - living in overexploitation conditions. The article is divided into three sections. In the first, we questioned the basic assumptions of the 'Brazil, a middle class nation' thesis. In the second, we explain the fundamentals of the overexploitation category and show how it increased in Brazilian capitalism production relations in the 2000s. In the third, we showed how the access the working population has had to consume durable goods in recent times, before the ascent to the supposed 'new middle class,' is a renewed type of overexploitation. Finally, we highlight the links between the Brazilian working class' labor conditions, health, and rights and the trends in world capitalism, questioning the false neoliberalism and neodevelopmentalism dilemma in the current debate and putting the real dilemma in terms of the emancipation of the working class against the despotic power of capital.

This essay presents an inter-institutional research initiative that brings together three research groups linked to graduate programs in physical education: the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, the University of São Paulo, and the Federal University of Espírito Santo. The main topics behind the project are the training policies for physical education and public health, which, initially, focus on the Education Program for Work in Health. The investigations to be undertaken aim to monitor and analyze the composition and coordination processes involved in teaching, in services, and in the community in pursuit of constituting a network of knowledge and practices that can meet the challenges of providing training in health committed to defending and consolidating the Unified Health System (SUS).

The central purpose of this article is to discuss the main categories of the Marxist Theory of Dependence. This effort is justified because this the-oretical perspective has been being retrieved in recent years. Firstly, there is a discussion on the original meaning of what the theory understands by dependence and, based on that, the specific nature of the integration of economies dependent on world capitalism. Then, in addition to reaffirming the central character of the overexploitation of labor as a specific feature of these economies, it is argued that this is only intelligible when understood as the response of dependent capitalism to different forms of transfer of value to the central economies. In view of the fore-going, the article concludes with notes on the directions that can be taken by a critical recovery of the Marxist theory of dependence.

This study aims to analyze how caregivers working at shelters for youth suffering from psychiatric or neurological disorders express their grief. The data come from the research project titled "Violence, Youth, and Mental Health," which was carried out from 2008 to 2010 by the Institute of Psychiatry at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and was based on 26 interviews and field observations made with professionals at one of the surveyed shelters. The study method was that of oral stories using a semi-structured script. These narratives were analyzed based on the theory of communications, which allowed categories to be defined. It was found that the conditions, organization, and work processes at the shelters are adverse and cause risks to the professionals' mental health, since they are unprepared to perform this work, in particular with patients suffering from psychiatric and neurological disorders, conditions that cause great distress among caregivers. Finally, it was fund that there is a need to provide training and permanent clinical supervision at the shelters based on the principles of psychosocial rehabilitation. Additionally, it is also necessary to drive greater integration among the tasks carried out at the shelters and those of the remaining special protection networks created for these adolescents.