The House of Natural Ecology addresses what may be the most neglected dimension of human ecology: our relationship to the created world and our place within it. This house gathers scholars who study nature in its fullness — biologists and physicists alongside philosophers of science, agrarian economists alongside theologians of creation, physicians alongside intelligent design theorists — united by the conviction that the natural world is not brute matter but a created order, bearing the marks of intelligibility, purpose, and design. Where the modern academy often treats nature as mechanism and the body as machine, Catholic thought insists that creation is gift, that it is ordered and purposeful, and that attending to that order is essential to understanding both nature and ourselves.

The scope of this house is deliberately broad. It encompasses fundamental questions about the intelligibility of nature — why the natural world is mathematically ordered, why it yields to rational inquiry, what the evidence of design in biological systems tells us about the deepest structure of reality — alongside the practical questions of how we inhabit, cultivate, and care for the created world. Scholars working on the philosophy of nature and the teleological argument sit alongside researchers studying regenerative agriculture, nutrition, and integrative approaches to medicine. What unites them is a shared conviction that creation is not a backdrop to human life but integral to it, and that the Catholic intellectual tradition offers indispensable resources for studying it whole.

This house emerges at a remarkable cultural moment. Across the political spectrum, people are rediscovering traditional wisdom about food, farming, health, and the human relationship to nature. Parents question ultra-processed foods and industrial agriculture. Farmers explore regenerative practices. Patients seek approaches to health that treat them as whole persons. At the same time, a growing number of scientists and philosophers are challenging the materialist consensus, asking whether the evidence of fine-tuning, biological complexity, and mathematical order points toward purpose rather than chance. These instincts — both the practical and the philosophical — are sound, but they need intellectual grounding and serious institutional support. The Catholic tradition offers precisely what is needed: a vision of creation as gift, the body as temple, limits as wisdom rather than constraint, the local as primary, and stewardship as sacred responsibility.