When is a tree ‘timber’?

In 1894, delegates to a New York constitutional convention decided that timber in the state’s forest preserve should not be “sold, removed or destroyed.” It might have helped if they had defined “timber,” but they didn’t. Maybe they thought the issue would never come up. Just as likely, there would have been no agreement on the meaning of timber even back then.

This summer, the meaning of timber suddenly became about as contentious as a definition can get. On the day before Independence Day, four out of five judges on the Third Judicial Department of the New York Supreme Court Appellate Division ruled that “timber” was essentially inclusive of the entire forest, not just big stately trees that were capable of being sawed into planks.