Recent news that Galloway Forest Park has been named the first official Dark Sky Park in Europe (and the fourth such park worldwide) is a sign of more than one isolated astronomical victory. Light pollution legislation and awareness about light pollution has meant that slowly but surely the UK is taking wasted and excessive light emissions seriously.

The International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) wants the world to be a darker place. At night, that is. Not just so that a handful of astronomers can get a better gawk at the milky-way, but because - as fantastically-monikered American writer Verlin Klinkenborg explained last year in National Geographic - darkness is "essential to our biological welfare."

Many of the people behind the IDA's schemes and projects make their living out of the possible interpretations of that claim, and it's through doing so that they and others have managed to get the public's attention and harness heightened light pollution awareness.

Martin Morgan-Taylor of Leicester De Montfort Law School deals with legal cases where light-pollution is identified as a 'statutory nuisance' - a recent innovation (2006) of the UK's legal system whereby anyone can take someone to court over dangerous or inappropriate lighting.

"It tends to be people being disturbed driving to work or trying to sleep. I get lots of reports from ordinary people who can't sleep because of new street lighting or who have neighbours with excessively powerful or poorly positioned security lights" explains Martin, adding that the number of cases like this has increased significantly over the past twelve months: "More and more people are hearing about local cases or their friends' cases and they're beginning to take action."

But why else do people care about light pollution? "I think a lot of people are starting to listen because we're telling the wider story of how much money it costs them and how it's adversely affecting the environment. We're not anti-light, we're anti-bad-light."

So light pollution has become strikingly relevant to this eco-conscious and recession-blighted age. In-vogue organisations such as the Campaign for Rural England provide extensive, easily obtainable information on how to use the new laws while the 'Need-Less' campaign group have been targeting people on- and offline about the effects of light pollution. Efforts like this seem to be fuelling the 'anti-bad-light' movement.

The reason that Galloway Forest Park's unveiling as an official Dark Sky Park is so significant in many people's minds is that it will continue to stimulate this sort of legal, environmental and economic awareness. In some ways it acts as a symbol for the things the movement wants to achieve - appreciation of the night sky in a protected environmentally-friendly space. This is despite the fact that public campaigning wasn't a central motivation for the park's application to the Dark Sky Parks project.

Steve Owens, Education Co-ordinator at the Glasgow Science Centre and UK Co-ordinator of the International Year of Astronomy (IYA) expressed surprise at the impact the news about Galloway Park has had.

"We didn't anticipate how it would capture the public's imagination. I'm still a little confused as to why it has. I suspect that it's because it's a big project, the first in Europe, something the UK can trumpet as being a world-leader in.

"We've not been looking to campaign for legislation, what we're doing through the Year of Astronomy is show people how fantastic the sky looks - which incidentally motivates people to see what it means not to have lights on in inappropriate places."

Owens is speaking to me from Scotland, where light-pollution legislation has only been in place since last year. The significance of light-pollution for the public has, it's safe to say, been defined by our general awareness of those related issues mentioned by Martin Morgan-Taylor. Martin also suggested that it's since those issues have been fore-grounded by the IDA as well as the benefits for astronomy, a decades-old concern with light pollution has begun to involve everyday people rather than a few star-gazing scientists and die-hard environmentalists.