"The people know what they want": an empowerment process of sustainable, ecological community health.

Community-focused nurses routinely confront issues of environmental hazards in the context of the community. Limits to disciplinary knowledge about health, environment, and community constrain practice for many who are interested in ways to promote community health across a spectrum of diverse needs and contexts, including the context of the environment. The purpose of the reported critical ethnography was to explore the relationships among health, environment, and culture from the cultural context of one community. Findings highlight the emancipatory, yet ambiguous, process through which this community transformed individual symptoms of illness into an experience and examination of community environment and community health. The significance of this work lies in inductively building knowledge and theory about these relationships and community empowerment for community-focused nursing.