Environmental and social inequalities and their determinants The concept of environmental inequalities has become a popular topic in France over the past decade. Rooted strongly in health issues, it takes on the issue of social inequalities in health, which also moved to the forefront at the beginning of the millennium. The external factors, whether they are social or environmental, are supposed to be those on which we can act, that we can modify: they therefore come under the heading of public health. After a brief review of what the concepts - also tightly interwoven - of environment and health represent, this article calls for the renewal of the concept of inequality that Sen provided by his approach through capabilities. The environment then is a "resource" a place where health comes to quench its thirst, its dimensions those of the group, even the community, and thus sometimes discordant with the individual's quality of life. This diversity of life and living things is difficult to grasp in the French context still so largely governed by the social contract established by Rousseau, especially constraining for individuals: "the total alienation of each associate with all his rights to the entire community". Sen's work, on the contrary, allows us to envision a deeply differentiated social landscape where multiple criteria specific to individuals and their capacities play a role. Our article, examining different examples of so-called environmental inequalities within the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, underlines the failure of the "social contract" for which, fundamentally, equality is mandatory. This reintroduction of nature and materiality challenge the established policies that are powerless to integrate the natural corollaries of the environment: limits, uncertainty, responsibility and the long-term. The question of environmental inequalities is thus a way of attracting attention to some dysfunctions of society, but in a way that imposes comparison and mimicry, a source of violence, rather than a more autonomous vision that would make it possible to build a life more appropriate to existing resources from the perspective of a collective responsibility for our common goods.
