Our Curators

A print and radio journalist and the author of numerous books, Yolaine de La Bigne was one of France’s earliest ‘rurbanites’. In 1993, she settled in Brittany while continuing to work in Paris, travelling constantly by high-speed and regional train—not least to present her daily France Info column, Quelle Époque Éthique ! 

Her work with Nicolas Hulot on the television programme Ushuaïa had already heightened her awareness of the natural world. Back in the Côtes-d’Armor of her childhood, she became fully conscious of the urgent need for action and began developing a wide range of environmental initiatives. With her husband, landscape architect Régis Guignard, she replanted kilometres of traditional hedgerows—an undertaking for which she received the Yves Rocher Foundation’s Terre de Femmes Award in 2002. She also created the ‘Écolo-J’ page for Jonas magazine (2001); wrote the radio series « Les Bonnes Nouvelles de l’Environnement » for Nature & Découvertes, broadcast by around one hundred local stations (2006); and founded Fêt’ Nat’, a Paris festival devoted to nature and ecology, featuring fashion shows, recycling workshops and live performances (from 2006). This event earned her the Femme en Or award in 2007. She subsequently published « L’Agenda vert 2009 » with Arthaud. 

Above all, in 2009 she launched Néoplanète, France’s first free environmental magazine. The project expanded through neoplanete.fr and later became the first round-the-clock online radio station devoted to protecting the planet, presenting environmental issues in a positive, engaging and accessible way. 

In 2016, believing that mainstream media had finally embraced environmental issues, Yolaine de La Bigne chose to focus on a more specific concern: the sixth mass extinction, the species in need of protection, and the newly emerging discoveries surrounding animal intelligence—discoveries with far-reaching ecological, scientific and philosophical implications. 

She created two annual events: the Animal Intelligence Encounters, held in late August first at the Château de La Bourbansais and subsequently at Branféré animal park in Brittany; and World Animal Intelligence Day, held on the first Saturday in February at the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie in Paris–La Villette. The talks delivered at these events are collected in a series of annual publications. She also launched the website L’Animal et l’Homme and the YouTube channel Les Intelligences animales. 

In 2019, she published Les 12 Sagesses des animaux with Leduc, followed in 2021 by the campaigning book Mon année zéro souffrance animale. In 2022, she launched a series of collaborative volumes: L’Animal médecin, L’Animal parent and L’Animal féministe.