The Adirondack Park has been a locus of social conflict related to land use for the past 150 years. Over the last decade, state and non-state actors have promulgated discourses, practices, and interventions that link together conservation and development. These actors promise that such interventions will benefit everyone, especially economically, and help to improve the lives of Adirondack residents and visitors. They also assert that the debates around these interventions are taking place in an atmosphere of inclusion and cooperation. This dissertation explores a recent conservation and development project in the Adirondack Park: the purchase and protection of 69,000 acres of formerly private forestland. Advocates of the project strenuously argued that the protection of this land would lead to an increase in tourism and have a transformative effect on local economies. Despite a promising start, the intervention failed to have the desired effect. Moreover, the process touched off an intense conflict, the roots of which can be traced to long-standing relations among people, nature, and capital in the Adirondack Park. This dissertation examines the conflict using a political ecology approach to tease out what went wrong and how similar circumstances affect conservation and development interventions all over the world.