Do we have a reality-based Wyoming or a perception-based Wyoming?

That was the question posed by author Sam Western to the participants in the Wyoming Wildlife Heritage Summit Friday afternoon.

Western, author of "Pushed Off the Mountaintop, Sold Down the River," arrived at the conference directly from western Ireland, where he drove on the "wrong" side of the road for two weeks with his mother and lived to tell the tale.

Ireland and Wyoming both have strong, nostalgic attachments to their images and perceptions. Ireland is wedded to cottages, peat fires, sheep grazing on blazingly green fields, he said. Wyoming is wedded to cowboys, ranches, independence and a rural ethos.

Western noted that contrary to those perceptions, Ireland and Wyoming really aren't rural. Ireland is 5 million people in a nation that's 33,000 square miles - about the size of Fremont, Sweetwater and Carbon counties combined, he said.

"But the questions I'm interested in - the inevitable clash - is when a nation, state, county or any political subdivision continues to see itself as rural when in fact it's not. How do we mesh those two realities and survive?" he asked.

Wyoming is an urban state, Western said. In 2005, 52.4 percent of Wyomingites lived in one of the five most populous counties - Natrona, Laramie, Campbell, Sweetwater and Fremont. Two cities alone, Casper and Cheyenne, have 20 percent of the population.

Yet Wyoming is not defined by her cities, said Western, but by her lack of cities.

"That perception has tremendous power," he said.

Wyoming is not about change, he said. "It is not about challenging accepted wisdom. Wyoming is about preservation, preservation of a way of life, preservation of capital, preservation of wild and scenic places. But are we preserving the perception or preserving the reality?"

Structurally and legally, county government is all about preserving a way of life, he said. He noted that statutes require that county commissioners may not be paid any more than the lowest compensation paid to any elected officers that serve full time. The effect of that is that while county commissioners wield tremendous power, young professionals cannot afford to serve. The job falls to the retired and the wealthy, Western said.

The inferred message from lawmakers is that they have little trust in county residents to govern themselves - they must be told how to run their governments.

Western said the perception was that Wyoming is an independent state of strong, local powers. In reality, he said, the state has strong, centralized government.

Wyoming has the perception that all its citizens participate in the world on self-dictated terms, which comes at a cost, he said.

Because of the strength of cultural perceptions, Wyomingites don't vote their economic interests, but they do vote their identity - an identity of living in a rural, agricultural state "when in fact we're not," he said.

Continuing that perception, that identity, said Western, will create two Wyomings, "none really poor, but let's say one half marginal and the other half prosperous."

Turning back to his recent visit to Ireland, Western said a stone cottage burning peat has more dignity than a crowded Dublin. "In Wyoming, a pastoral grazing economy has more dignity than a booming energy town," he said.

Western warned that the next 50 years will be wrenching in human history, noting the world's population will rise to 9 billion. To those who move to Wyoming, what sort of expectations do you place on them, he asked.

"I'm hoping those expectations will be self-generated, coming from within Wyoming, not from without," he said.