Another Life: It's been tarmacadamed for years but to me it's still the boreen: a loop of narrow road with an offshoot to the strand. When I started walking its stony way almost 30 years ago, there were eight houses spaced out, one to a farm. Today there are 16 and foundations for another, writes Michael Viney.
There's a lull, for the moment, in the rubbish the builders toss out from their vans - only three cigarette packs to pick up today - but nothing to be done about the lost chunks of field-bank and hedgerow.
Even so, the boreen is in remarkably good shape botanically - better, indeed, than when hungry cattle grazed "the long mile". There are sumptuous stretches of ferns, better than any at Chelsea, and midsummer sunrise found honeysuckle (see drawing), burnet rose, yellow flag, ragged robin, marsh cinquefoil, to name just some of the lovelies. I ought, perhaps, to make a list of everything, from the wild thyme at the top of the bank to the wild mint at the bottom, just to record what was there now. But as we are already launched on worldwide loss of the natural world - what's the significance of one Mayo boreen? I had to think hard for marsh cinquefoil: its spiky flowers, a bit like those of strawberries but a rich, dark purple, are more usually found nodding in the bog.
Looking it up, I see that it was named by John Gerard, of 16th century herbal fame. His big book and its dramatic woodcuts summed up the delight in plants of the exploratory, apothecary age. More than four centuries on, we are still putting names to the world's species and recruiting their potential for human health and happiness. But our pressure on natural ecosystems is beginning to undermine this.
Next month there's an international conference in Galway, hugely impressive in prospect, that puts world threats to biodiversity on a par with the perils of climate change.
Cohab 2005 is, perhaps belatedly, the "First International Conference on the Importance of Biodiversity to Human Health" and is backed by a whole legion of interests, from the Secretariat of the Convention on Biodiversity (signed at Rio in 1992) the UN's World Conservation Monitoring Centre and Harvard Medical School, through various pharmaceutical companies (GlaxoSmithKline is the sponsor), to Ireland's own university institutes and environmental agencies.
Prof Chris Shaw, who holds the chair of drug discovery in Queen's University, Belfast, will address the bread-and-butter priority of medicine and the pharmaceutical industry - the exploration and discovery of novel therapeutic compounds from wild species. But this core of human self-interest comes wrapped in concern for conservation and the balance of people within nature: keeping more people alive for longer simply steps up the pressure of our ecosystems on the rest of the living world.
The familiar story of plant medicine continues, as trees and herbs yield up new drugs for global killers like cancer and malaria. But animals, too, have more things to share with humanity than simple meat or fur. Cohab cites the example of the polar bear, under intensive study even as man-made warming is wiping out its habitat. Despite months without exercising, feeding or urinating, the bears survive hibernation without any ill effects on bone density or liver or kidney function: here could be insights into osteoporosis and for treatment of renal failure. Their extremes of fasting and feasting would play havoc in other mammals, so bear physiology may yield clues to human diseases such as diabetes - that is, if they manage to survive in an ocean without ice.
Cone snails of tropical oceans have beautifully-patterned cone-shaped shells (a couple, bought on impulse in New York, now decorate a shelf in our loo). They feed on other invertebrates and small fish, spearing them with a toxic harpoon. Each of the 500 species of cone snail has its own suite of peptide toxins - perhaps 50,000 chemicals in total - of which a tiny number have been characterised. Like curare, a plant poison that paralyses human muscle, cone snail toxins have new uses in medicine. Working with one such compound, Elan Pharmaceuticals, the Irish-based pharmaceutical company, has produced a drug reputedly 1,000 times more potent than morphine in the treatment of chronic pain, without developing tolerance or dependency.
A wealth of compounds from the sea act on human cardiovascular and nervous ecosystems and have anti-cancer or antibiotic activity. In a single decade, some 2,500 new metabolites were reported, most of them isolated from seabed organisms like sponges, seaweeds, sea anemones and urchins. Plankton plant cells, too, abound in powerful chemicals with as yet untested roles in biotechnology. This potential should give impetus to Ireland's role in protecting one of the richest areas of Atlantic sea-life from pollution, sea-bed damage and over-exploitation.
All this fits well with the current ambitions of the Marine Institute, busy in Galway making Ireland's name in international marine research.
• Cohab 2005 will be held at the Galway Radisson Hotel from Aug 23 to 25