He was exposed to many contrasting environments in his childhood, from the farm in Tennessee where he was born to a military arsenal in Ohio, to Rhode Island and finally to Cambridge University in England-yet he always returned to Indiana, where he remains with his wife, who is also a professor at Indiana University, where he is one of the luminaries of the school's graduate program in writing

             (Our Land, Our Literature-Scott Russell Sanders, 2002) .

             According to a recent e-biography, the author has ventured from the Midwest during his teaching and writing career as a writer-in-residence at Philip Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and a visiting scholar, at of all places, the urban and technical Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These New England bastions of education may have helped influence his vision, explicitly connected to Thoreau, Emerson, and the other 19th century New England Transcendentalists, that continues to evolve in his literary, environmentalist, and political prose.

             In a 2000 interview with The Kenyan Review Sanders spoke about the reoccurring themes in his work, of his love of the land, his belief in pacifism, and his father's military background. "The contrasts and tensions arise from my life - North/South, country and city, militarism and pacifism. Living as a boy in an arsenal in Ohio, I felt a fierce contrast between the fruitfulness and wildness of nature, on one hand, and the ingenuity and destructiveness of technology, on the other. As a writer I keep seeing these contrasts. and maybe I'm still trying to bring the two poles together, to reconcile enemies." .

             Scott Russell Sanders thus describes himself as an author who has been deeply affected by his geographical and environmental surroundings and circumstances. He describes himself as a passionate product of his environment. He is a dedicated environmentalist. The transcriber of the interview in The Kenyan Review, in his critical overview of his subject's work noted that: "Sanders celebrates the beauty of nature.