The Clinton administration's recent proposal to protect roadless areas in our national forests is already under attack in Congress. One often-repeated objection is that roads are needed for logging, logging is necessary for a healthy forest, and our forests are suffering a health crisis. As prescriptions go, this one verges on quackery.

The term "forest health" is so poorly understood and defined nowadays that it's virtually useless. When first coined, in 1932, it referred solely to insects and tree diseases. Now people use it to encompass fire, storms, or virtually anything. But all of the data, both from the Forest Service and studies by many forestry researchers including me, indicate there's been no change in the real condition of our forests, other than through excess and ill-advised logging.

In terms of disease and insects there has been no difference in true forest health for at least 50 years. In fact, a report from the U.S. Forest Service indicated that between 1952 and 1992 the amount of damage from disease, insects and all other major causes-including fire-was less than 1 percent of the standing commercial timber throughout the U.S. And the numbers stayed at those levels the entire time, with no ups and downs.

The same thing is true of both public and private lands. Naturally there were some localized fluctuations in certain diseases and certain insects, but overall there were no major changes.

Unfortunately, this basic reality often gets distorted in order to accomplish some kind of cutting plan. In the Pacific Northwest, for instance, we hear that in many regions the Douglas fir is threatened by bark beetles But when we go to those areas and investigate, we find that a significant problem just doesn't exist. There are some beetles, all right, the overall beetle population is in decline and the amount of damage is extremely low. Of course if you only look for trees with beetles, you'll find them. But in the whole forest the mortality rates hover around the historical rates of 1 to 2 percent. And this is true of root diseases and other pests, of different species of trees, and in different areas of the country.

Claiming harm to forest health is merely an excuse to log, but logging in the roadless areas is plain foolishness. The reason they weren't logged long ago is that early loggers knew there was little worthwhile timber in these areas. Moreover, Forest Service land provides only 5 percent of the national timber harvest in the U.S. to begin with, and the amount available from roadless areas in national forests is a tiny fraction of that.

Through heavy-handed logging, however, we've already fragmented our forests so badly that we've caused immeasurable damage to fish and wildlife. Widespread clearcutting has also brought changes in the water cycles, creating rapid runoff and melting during the spring, leaving little available water during the summer, when it's needed most. Even the local weather has been affected-if you change the structure of the forest, you change wind patterns and rainfall as well.

In spite of this, I'm more optimistic than I was 15 years ago. Back then nobody would listen to such concerns. All they could think about was the product and not the results of producing that product. We need to continue to improve the way we maintain our forests. We have to stop using wrong-headed excuses like "forest health" to log in the few and fragmented remaining roadless areas that America still treasures. If we destroy such areas through needless incursion we will leave our descendants far poorer than justified by the small immediate profits, and they will wonder what sort of physicians made such poor judgments about health.

Note: Arthur D. Partridge is a former logger, Forest Service employee, and professor at the University of Idaho, where he specialized in the disease and insect problems of forests for 37 years.