OxfordAQA International A-level Sociology (9690): Unit 4 – People and the environment – Study Guide

This guide covers section 3.2.2 People and the environment (3.2.2.1 to 3.2.2.3) of the OxfordAQA International AS and A-level Sociology (9690) specification, Version 1.1 (first teaching September 2026; first A-level exams May/June 2028). The section is A-level content and is assessed in Unit 4: People and the environment, a 1 hour 30 minute exam worth 50 marks and 20% of the International A-level.

Keep the revision notes and the practice questions open as you work. Track progress on the OxfordAQA A-level Sociology hub and the OxfordAQA A-level Sociology checklist. For the whole course’s exam structure, read preparing for the new 9690 specification.

What the specification covers

Syllabus reference	What you must know (as printed)	Where assessed
3.2.2.1 The built human environment	Nomadic lifestyles; rural areas: peasants and landless labourers, rural depopulation; urbanisation; social life in cities: ‘slums’ and informal housing, suburbia, segregation, gated communities, megacities, non-places; power and inequalities in rural and urban areas; cities and changing environment and climate; demographic transition theory	Unit 4
3.2.2.2 Human impacts on environment	Views of people and the natural world: exploitation for human use, romanticism, conservation, media representations; future generations and ‘the long now’; consumption, sustainability, energy sources; agriculture and food; mass transport and commuting, tourism and over-tourism; air, land and water pollution, plastics, e-waste; desertification, deforestation, extraction and mining, national parks and protected areas, oceans; global heating, wildfires; social construction of environment and climate crises as social problems; scepticism and denialism, governments and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, environmental movements; ecological modernisation theory, green Marxism; inequalities between and within countries; environmental and climate justice	Unit 4
3.2.2.3 People and animals	The zoological connection (Bryant); views of humans and animals; animal welfare, cruelty and rights; domestication: working animals, livestock, production and slaughter of animals for food; pets and therapeutic use of animals; zoonotic diseases; the Columbian Exchange; extinctions, megafauna, hunting and fishing, invasive species; conservation, zoos, rewilding, reintroduction, de-extinction; biotechnology and genomics; animal experimentation	Unit 4

The specification says students “would benefit from studying” Augé, Brand, Bryant, Bullard, (Mike) Davis and Hannigan, and that “appropriate use of the work of other sociologists will be credited”.

How Unit 4 is assessed

The specification prints: exam 1 hour 30 minutes; 50 marks; 20% of the International A-level; “short and extended response questions”. Unit 4’s approximate weightings are AO1 (knowledge) 7%, AO2 (application) 6% and AO3 (analysis and evaluation) 7% of the A-level. You must also “use examples from their own society or a society they know about” in “selected extended response questions”. Question tariffs are not printed; your teacher will confirm them.

3.2.2.1 The built human environment

Nomadic lifestyles involve moving with herds or seasons rather than living in one settlement. Pastoral groups such as Bedouin and Maasai herders have faced pressure to settle (sedentarisation) from states, land enclosure and drought.

Rural areas. Peasants farm small plots mainly for their own household; landless labourers own no land and sell their labour. Rural depopulation happens when young people leave for city work, leaving ageing villages. Power is shaped by landownership. Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), founded in 1984, occupies unused land to demand redistribution.

Urbanisation is the growth in the share of people living in towns and cities. Key ideas:

• ‘Slums’ and informal housing: UN-Habitat defines a slum household as lacking one or more of durable housing, enough living space, improved water, improved sanitation or secure tenure. Mike Davis, in Planet of Slums (2006), argued that slum growth followed debt and structural adjustment policies from the 1980s and that much urban growth happened without matching industrial jobs. Critics say he underplayed residents’ own organising.
• Suburbia: lower-density housing on city edges, often linked to car use and commuting.
• Segregation: separation of groups by class, ethnicity or religion across city space.
• Gated communities: walled estates with controlled entry. Davis’s City of Quartz (1990) described a “fortress” Los Angeles.
• Megacities: urban areas of over 10 million people, such as Lagos, Karachi or Dhaka.
• Non-places: Marc Augé, in Non-places (French 1992, English 1995), described spaces of transit and consumption, such as airports, motorways, hotel chains and shopping malls, where people pass through anonymously without shared history or relationships.

Cities and changing environment and climate. Concrete and traffic create urban heat islands. Coastal megacities such as Jakarta face flooding and sinking land. Yet dense cities can also cut energy use per person.

Demographic transition theory, developed by Warren Thompson and formalised by Frank Notestein, describes four stages: high birth and death rates; falling death rates with high birth rates (rapid growth); falling birth rates; low birth and death rates. Evaluation: it is based on European history, it ignores state policies such as China’s one-child policy, and it cannot predict when or whether poorer countries will move through it.

Worked paragraph. Knowledge: Augé argued that supermodern societies create non-places, spaces people pass through without forming bonds. Application: in a fast-growing city such as Dubai, a large share of daily life happens in malls, metro stations and the airport. Analysis: this suggests urbanisation can weaken community, because shared memory is replaced by contractual, anonymous contact. Evaluation: however, workers who spend every day in an airport or mall may form strong relationships there, so a “non-place” for a traveller can be a place for staff.

3.2.2.2 Ideas about nature, time and consumption

Views of people and the natural world:

• Exploitation for human use: nature is a resource. Lynn White (1967) argued that a religious idea of human “dominion” helped justify this in Western thought.
• Romanticism: nature as pure, spiritual and restorative, seen in Wordsworth’s poetry and Thoreau’s Walden (1854).
• Conservation: managing nature to protect it, as in Yellowstone, the first national park (1872).
• Media representations: nature documentaries, disaster news and advertising shape what people see as “nature” and as a problem.

Future generations and ‘the long now’. The specification lists “Brand” without a first name. Stewart Brand co-founded the Long Now Foundation in 1996 and wrote The Clock of the Long Now (1999); the Foundation’s clock is designed to run for 10,000 years, as a symbol of thinking across many generations. Ulrich Brand, with Markus Wissen, wrote The Imperial Mode of Living (German 2017, English 2021), arguing that everyday consumption in richer countries depends on cheap labour and nature elsewhere. ‘The long now’ wording suggests Stewart Brand; your teacher will confirm. The Brundtland Report (1987) defined sustainable development as meeting “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.

Consumption, sustainability and energy. High consumption uses more materials and energy. Fossil fuels still dominate; renewables and nuclear are contested alternatives.

Agriculture and food. Meat, dairy, imported produce and food waste have environmental costs. The Green Revolution of the 1960s raised yields with new seeds, fertiliser and irrigation; Vandana Shiva argued it damaged soils and deepened rural inequality.

Human movement. Mass transport and long commutes raise emissions and air pollution. Over-tourism is when visitor numbers damage environments and push out residents.

Worked paragraph. Knowledge: romanticism treats nature as a pure space to be experienced. Application: in Pakistan’s northern valleys, images of untouched mountains on social media draw large numbers of domestic tourists. Analysis: this shows how a romantic view can produce the damage it values, through traffic, litter and hotel building. Evaluation: on the other hand, tourism income can fund protection, so the outcome depends on regulation rather than on the view of nature alone.

3.2.2.2 Environmental problems and the climate crisis

Pollution: air (traffic, industry, crop burning), land (landfill, toxic dumping) and water (sewage, chemicals). Plastics persist for centuries and break into microplastics. E-waste is often shipped to poorer countries for informal recycling, exposing workers to toxic fumes.

Changing landscapes: desertification in the Sahel; deforestation in the Amazon for cattle and soya; extraction and mining for coal, oil and battery metals; national parks and protected areas, which sometimes removed indigenous residents; and oceans affected by overfishing, warming and acidification.

The climate crisis: global heating raises sea levels and the frequency of heatwaves, floods and wildfires, such as Australia’s 2019-20 “Black Summer” fires.

Social construction. John Hannigan’s Environmental Sociology: A Social Constructionist Perspective (1995) argues that environmental problems are real but must be claimed to become public issues. He named six factors for success: scientific authority; popularisers who link science and campaigning; media attention framing the issue as new and important; dramatic symbols and images; visible economic incentives for action; and an institutional sponsor. Evaluation: realists argue that stressing construction can seem to excuse scepticism about well-evidenced problems.

Responses to the climate crisis:

• Scepticism and denialism: doubting the science, its human cause or the need to act. Historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, in Merchants of Doubt (2010), traced organised campaigns to manufacture doubt. Kari Norgaard’s Living in Denial (2011) showed that people who accept the science may still avoid thinking about it.
• Governments and the IPCC: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the UN Environment Programme to assess climate science for governments. Targets are agreed through UN conferences.
• Environmental movements: from India’s Chipko forest movement (1973) and Greenpeace to Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future (both 2018).

Worked paragraph. Knowledge: Hannigan argues an issue needs scientific authority, media attention and an institutional sponsor. Application: a campaign about smog in a city can use air-quality readings, images of children in masks and support from a court or ministry. Analysis: this explains why smog becomes a seasonal headline, while slower problems such as soil loss stay hidden. Evaluation: but construction is not the whole story, because smog is physically visible and harms health whether or not it is claimed.

3.2.2.2 Sociological views and environmental justice

Ecological modernisation theory (EMT), associated with Arthur Mol and Gert Spaargaren, argues that capitalism can become greener through technology, regulation and market incentives, so growth and environmental protection can go together. Strength: falling renewable energy costs support it. Limitation: efficiency gains are often outweighed by rising total consumption, and dirty production may simply move to poorer countries.

Green Marxism argues that capitalism’s drive for profit and growth causes environmental damage. John Bellamy Foster developed Marx’s idea of a metabolic rift between society and natural cycles. Allan Schnaiberg’s treadmill of production (1980) argues that firms must keep expanding output, using more resources. Strength: it explains why damage continues despite green policies. Limitation: state socialist societies also caused severe pollution, which suggests industrialism, not only capitalism, is to blame.

Inequalities between and within countries. Richer countries and richer people produce far more emissions per head, yet poorer countries and poorer people often suffer first and worst, and have least access to acting sustainably (solar panels, electric cars, organic food). Pakistan’s 2022 floods hit a country with low historical emissions. Within countries, poorer areas are more exposed to heat, flooding and pollution.

Environmental and climate justice. Robert Bullard, called the “father of environmental justice”, was an expert witness in the 1979 Houston lawsuit Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management; his research showed that the city’s waste sites were placed mainly in Black neighbourhoods. His book Dumping in Dixie (1990) linked race, class and environmental harm. Climate justice asks who caused climate change, who pays and who suffers; the loss and damage fund agreed at COP27 (2022) is one response.

Worked paragraph. Knowledge: Bullard showed that hazardous sites cluster where people have least political power. Application: in many South Asian cities, tanneries and brick kilns sit beside informal settlements rather than wealthy suburbs. Analysis: this supports green Marxist views that costs are pushed onto those with least power. Evaluation: however, EMT supporters would note that stricter regulation can relocate or clean such industries, so the pattern is not fixed.

3.2.2.3 People and animals

The zoological connection. Clifton Bryant (1979) argued that sociologists had largely ignored how much human behaviour involves animals, as workers, food, companions, property and victims, and called for this “zoological connection” to be studied.

Views of humans and animals. Anthropocentrism puts human interests first. Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975) argued that animal suffering counts morally; Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights (1983) argued that animals have rights that cannot be traded away. Animal welfare accepts human use but seeks to reduce suffering; animal rights rejects use itself; animal cruelty is unnecessary harm, often defined in law.

Domestication. Working animals (oxen, donkeys, guard dogs) and livestock raised for food. Industrial meat production hides slaughter from consumers.

Pets are companion animals treated as family members. Animals are used therapeutically, for example assistance dogs and animal-assisted therapy, though research on health benefits is mixed.

Health. Zoonotic diseases pass from animals to humans, such as rabies, Ebola and avian influenza; HIV-1 originated from a virus in chimpanzees. Deforestation and wildlife trade increase human contact with wild animals.

The Columbian Exchange, named by Alfred Crosby (1972), was the transfer of plants, animals and diseases between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia after 1492: horses, cattle and smallpox to the Americas; maize, potatoes and turkeys to Afro-Eurasia.

Biodiversity loss: extinctions; falling numbers of megafauna; overhunting and overfishing; invasive species such as cane toads in Australia. Countering loss: conservation, zoos (seen as “arks” or as captivity), rewilding, reintroduction (grey wolves returned to Yellowstone in 1995) and proposed de-extinction.

Biotechnology and genomics include genetically modified animals and gene editing. Animal experimentation is defended for medical progress and challenged by rights theorists; the “3Rs” (replace, reduce, refine) guide much regulation.

Worked paragraph. Knowledge: rewilding returns land to natural processes and may reintroduce lost species. Application: the return of wolves to Yellowstone changed grazing patterns. Analysis: this shows biodiversity loss can be partly reversed when land is set aside. Evaluation: but farmers often bear the costs through lost livestock, so rewilding raises justice questions about whose land and livelihoods pay for conservation.

Common errors

• Defining a megacity loosely as “a big city”; use the 10 million threshold.
• Treating ecological modernisation and green Marxism as two names for “green views”; they disagree on whether capitalism can be sustainable.
• Describing Hannigan as saying problems are “not real”; he argues they are real but need claims-making.
• Confusing animal welfare (reduce suffering) with animal rights (end use).
• Writing about climate change only in general; the specification asks you to use your own society or one you know.

Where to go next

Condense this guide with the revision notes, then test yourself with the practice questions. Sustainable development and climate migration also appear in People and development; transport’s effects appear in People and technology.

Official syllabus

OxfordAQA International AS and A-level Sociology (9690) specification, Version 1.1 (first teaching September 2026; first A-level exams May/June 2028), section 3.2.2 People and the environment.