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Without aiming for exhaustivity and without denying the contributions of interdisciplinarity, this article presents some contributions to the knowledge of environmental inequalities based on sociological surveys conducted in French localities. We postulate, in order to test here some advances from this research that environmental inequalities cannot only be deduced from socio-economic variables, even though these play a structuring role. Furthermore, second hypothesis, environmental protection policies, including in their participatory reforms, most often contribute to reinforcing inequalities rather than reducing them, despite the stated equity objectives. The last hypothesis is that in contemporary France, social movements for environmental justice can help mitigating social and environmental inequalities.JEL Codes: Q3, Q5, D3, D6.