A political ecology approach to the study of environmental health problems can provide a comprehensive analytical framework with which to understand geographical and social disparities in health status. To date, however, political ecology has remained limited in its application to health problems, and where health has been addressed, biomedical models have prevailed, with little attention to differing explanatory models of health and disease. By integrating political ecology with an interpretive critical medical anthropology, one can better understand the ways in which health and environment intersect, and the differing social responses to environmental practices that affect human health. In this paper I summarize these theoretical issues and then discuss how this theory can be applied toward an analysis of air quality and health in Houston, Texas. This research suggests that local understandings of respiratory health often contradict public health concepts of environmental health and, in turn, differentially shape people's interactions with the environment.

A section in the River Dwyfach shows the main Snowdon Lavas and Tuffs to be overlain by a series of sediments and tuffs with a Longvillian fauna near the base. These sediments are followed by black graptolitic shales belonging to the Dicranograptus clingani and Pleurograptus linearis zones overlain by Ashgill mudstones with Phillipsinclla parabola.

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As pharmaceutical companies and conservation groups increasingly recognize the biomedical and economic potential of indigenous medicines from tropical rainforests, romanticized stereotypes of rainforest medicines as inherently beneficial abound. These ideas fail to take into consideration the question of why those living in the rainforest need medicines, and whether or not "traditional" medicines are a "choice" to those who do not have access to pharmaceutical medicines. This paper presents a theoretical analysis of how the study and practice of commodifying indigenous medicines has tended to exclude the structural factors shaping their use in indigenous communities, drawing on 14 months' ethnographic research on access to medicines near the Ranomafana National Park in southeastern Madagascar. I suggest that researchers and practitioners of conservation and development consider the ways in which "modernizing" tropical rainforest communities shapes patterns of health and illness unevenly, thereby contributing to changing medical "traditions."