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.
territory; health promotion; Family Health Strategy; Community Health Agent; environmental problems
