ABSTRACT
The general and polysemic term 'nature' is of limited interest in establishing a relevant sanitary perspective as an operational reality; health is a complex and relative process, significantly affected by a wide range of social and environmental factors — especially at a time when human populations live more and more massively in vastly anthropized, in particular urban, settings. One can easily grasp the displacement introduced by the concept of environment regarding nature, replacing an ontology, always arbitrary, with a reflexive dynamic that responds to the massive and increasing action exerted by mankind on the physical and living world in a fundamentally temporal perspective. The concept of environmental health is not only relevant in providing the elements for a diagnosis: its operative power resides in its reflexive aim to act on the environment, not only in order to eliminate its potentially dangerous or harmful components, but also to promote favourable ones, opening a very broad field for collective action.
