This communication explains the birth of an environmental problem, light pollution, understood as a socio-technical controversy. Over forty years, in support of the actor-network approach, it traces the conditions of its emergence, transformation and dissemination to local, national and transnational levels, and through various professional disciplines. Schematically, "environmentalists" uphold a holistic approach of "nocturnité" and define artificial light as a pollutant. Facing them, the "technicist" defend a segmented approach and define artificial light as a nuisance. The implementation of this controversy on the political agenda leads to institutional decisions that grasp it with difficulty in all its social, scientific and spatial dimensions. The spatial spread of the controversy in the zoning and the standardization process appears as a partial and segmented regulatory response to this problem.
