Investigating the environments of galaxies and active galactic nuclei (AGN) is crucial to understanding the formation and evolution of AGN and the host galaxies in which they reside. The environments of galaxies can inform star formation and morphology. The environments of AGN can inform possible accretion scenarios and therefore activity, as well as feedback. Similar environments are expected for the various flavours of AGN as guided by AGN unification. As well, if active galaxies reside in the same environments as passive galaxies, this supports normal galaxies experiencing relatively short periods of activity throughout their lifetimes. We have characterized the environments of a sample of nearby Type I AGN as well as the environments of other active and passive galaxies in the same redshift range. We find a strong similarity between the environments of the reference sample with the comparison AGN and normal galaxies. These results support AGN unification and AGN/galaxy unification where normal galaxies have active periods. We then investigate the environmental dependence for some AGN and host galaxy properties. We find no strong dependence for any parameter over both small scale environment and larger scale environment. This suggests that galaxy and AGN evolution is not sensitive to environment, but is driven by processes within the host galaxy for our sample of optically selected nearby Type I AGN.