'The survival of any species can never be a foregone conclusion," wrote Tony Whilde in his The Natural History of Connemara. "Wildlife conservation is a very difficult task, more so with the economic and political obstacles that continually bedevil it."
At that time - 1994 - Dr Whilde had come through years of bruising controversy as the first ecologist to speak out on the harm that overgrazing was doing to the Connemara uplands. He died soon afterwards, and far too young, of a brain tumour.
But his comments in the book were sparked off by something else altogether. The species in his mind was a rare plant called slender cottongrass, now at the centre of a row of a kind becoming all too familiar - the routing of an outer bypass round the city of Galway. The National Parks and Wildlife Service (which everyone still calls Duchas) wants to protect the plant's key peatland habitats with Natural Heritage Area orders; the National Roads Authority says it should have spoken up sooner.
The row itself can be left to the news columns, except to say that the rarity of slender cottongrass, Eriophorum gracile, and of its known locations in Connemara were published in the Irish Red Data Book of endangered plant species - a Government publication - as long ago as 1988.
And if there had been a National Biological Records Centre, of the sort only lately approved, the road planners could have checked the maps and asked the right questions earlier.
Slender cottongrass is interesting ecologically and quite pretty - if that matters - though not as dazzling as the common cottongrass when that spreads a shimmering veil across the summer bog. But, like the tiny, rare, post-glacial snails that have made other problems for motorways and golf courses, it brings us up against some basic conservation issues.
At a time of unprecedented and wholesale man-made extinctions of plants and animals, how serious must we be about protecting rare species few people will ever see or know about? Since species have come and gone throughout Earth's history, do we have to look after all the current rarities, or just those that might be useful in the future of our own species? How absolute is the planet's need for biodiversity - and if it isn't, who decides what can go? More than 60 of Europe's wild plants are now extinct and another 800 are threatened. Slender cottongrass, one of those rated as "vulnerable", was first recorded in Ireland as late as 1966. It has about 20 known sites in Connemara, two in Kerry and one each in Mayo and Westmeath. It's physically a bit different from our three other kinds of bogcotton, with a triangular stem and somewhat skimpy tufts of flowers, and its favourite habitats are the floating rafts of vegetation that form around the edges of bog lakes, or very wet areas of quaking bogs. It spreads by creeping rhizomes rather than seeds, which helps to keep it very local. Drainage and infilling are the obvious enemies and have already cost the plant two of its last handful of sites in Britain.
Across the Atlantic it finds wetland refuges in Canada, and in the US from New York to California, though now "rare and possibly extirpated" from the northern great plains. So it is not globally endangered (I haven't even looked at the lakelands and vast tundra of Siberia). Nor is it a "keynote" species, so far as we know - a whole Irish ecosystem isn't going to fall apart if it isn't there to be eaten by Greenland white-fronted geese, or to support a particular insect that has to do a particular job of pollination, or whatever. It could, however, be reckoned an "indicator" species, in the sense that while it survives, so does the bog lake it grows in: drainage schemes continue to suck the life out of our bogs and wetlands, our most special habitats of biodiversity.
"Biodiversity-loss matters," as Minister Cullen's department reminded us a a few months ago. "It matters for ethical, emotional, environmental and economic reasons. Ethically, we have a responsibility to future generations to maintain the diversity of life on earth. . ." The Department was promoting an EU strategy conference to halt the loss of biodiversity by 2010 - surely a visionary target. And half the battle is getting the message across that biodiversity means the whole range of species, including the small, the bad and the ugly and species that few of us will ever see.
Would it help slender cottongrass to be as pretty and exotic as an orchid? Or to promise a cure for hay fever? Or to have been St Patrick's favourite buttonhole? We are a long way from accepting that a species may seem a most useless and insignificant life-form (all, of course, to the human view) but that, as a rarity in a threatened habitat, it could still be worth bending the road.