The article, a critical essay, presents the notion of an emancipatory promotion of health (EPH), which seeks to relate the field of public health in theoretical and practical terms with the reinvention of utopias and relevant social struggles of our time principally in the Global South, a metaphor designating the peripheral or semiperipheral regions of the modern world-system. This is a relevant topic in the face of the planetary socio-ecological crisis and the debate on economic development, democracy and sustainability at a moment especially critical for the Brazilian reality and other countries. In particular, the contributions of peoples and social movements from rural, forests and water-dominated regions in Brazil to the emancipatory practices of health are discussed. The article is mainly based on two theoretical and methodological references, the Political Ecology and post-colonial approaches. The first focuses its analysis on the intensification of the social metabolism and environmental conflicts in the global capitalist economy, based on an unfair and unsustainable international trade that generates numerous socio-environmental conflicts, mainly in the Global South, that is, the peripheral countries that export agricultural and mineral commodities to richer ones. The second reference broadens and integrates the critique of capitalism with colonialism and patriarchy, understood as the three axes of oppression resulting from the Eurocentric modernity project. The challenge here is to deconstruct and reconstruct through an intercultural dialogue new conceptions of society, economy, nature, development, work and health. Such references help us to understand the importance of indigenous, peasant and Afro-descendant struggles for an emancipatory health promotion.