Are our state populations overstated? World?

I don’t know how many of our readers here have ever traveled across Wyoming, either west to east or north to south, or visa versa. The western one-third of the state is beautiful, with Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National Park, and the Wind River Mountains, to name a few outstanding highlights. But getting there … say you enter the state via Gillette on I-80 traveling west. You’ll encounter high winds and blowing dust, pronghorn for hundreds of miles of what must be one of the busiest semi-truck highways in the country. It is almost unbearable.

There are miles upon miles of unsettled land in Wyoming. As much as 30% of the state is managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). If you are unfamiliar with our public land hierarchy, it goes like this:

1. National Parks, areas of beauty that are protected from development and managed for tourists.
2. Wilderness areas, places of special beauty protected from development and which “man himself is a visitor”, no roads or motorized vehicles allowed, not even bicycles or chainsaws.
3. National Forests, areas managed for their natural resources and on which hunting, fishing, and mining are allowed.
4. National Monuments, areas protected by the Antiquities Act (1906), designed to preserve assets such as ancient ruins which may be stumbled upon in other activities, like subdivision development. Once discovered, the Act allows immediate preservation. President Clinton got carried away using this act, preserving large National Park-sized areas like Grand Staircase Escalante in Utah … a president can declare a monument, only congress can undeclare it, subject, of course, to presidential veto.
5. BLM lands, our least desirable public lands. These are the dry prairies and deserts of Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Montana and New Mexico, for instance, where only pronghorn and rattlesnakes thrive, and where ranchers negotiate grazing leases rather than owning these barren lands outright. (During the Great Depression, when so many people and businesses went bankrupt, farms and ranches were left untended, and became “acquired” BLM lands.)

So it is that driving through Wyoming east of the Rockies, it appears desolate and unsettled, where you can travel miles without seeing a farm house. Water is scarce, people even scarcer.

Years ago I remember reading about someone who took the trouble, using a AAA Atlas or some other reference, and, as I recall, adding up the populations of all of listed cities in the state of New York. Memories are frail, so don’t hold me to anything, but as I recall he came up several million short of the official US Census population of the state. This was back in the time when the Georgia Guidestones were still in existence, and had on them a proclamation (one of ten) stating that we should “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature”. That in mind, especially  use of the word “maintain”, the guy doing that New York State research (or someone else) wondered if our official population numbers are not perhaps deliberately overstated. It might be easy to do so, as, after all, as I cannot conceive of the number seven billion in my mind. It is unfathomable except to computers.

That in mind, I decided to do the same experiment for Wyoming using the AAA 2017 Deluxe Road Atlas. It lists all of the cities and towns of Wyoming on a sidebar, along with their populations. I added them all up, and came up with a population of 399,136 people. The official census of Wyoming lists the following population for the state:

• 2000 493,782
• 2010  563,626
• 2020  576,851.

2017 Was a non-census year, but they do estimate state populations at the Census Bureau, and Wyoming at that time as said to have 579,315 – 579,994 people. Let’s call it 580,000. That in mind, and assuming the AAA was using current census estimates rather than the 2010 numbers (it hardly matters), their numbers come up short by 180,864 people.

What gives? That is more people than live in the four largest cities, Cheyenne, Casper, Gillette and Rock Springs. Are these all people living in farmhouses and away from cities and towns? That could account for some of the shortage, but remember this: Wyoming is sparsely populated for a reason, lack of moisture. For that reason, farms and ranches are large, as it takes a lot of acres of dry grassland to raise one cow. So I don’t think that this answers for any more than a small part of the shortage.

Could it be that AAA is just sloppy? Possibly. It is under no obligation to provide accurate population data. We only want its roadmaps to be accurate. But AAA has no means by itself of determining state populations, or those of individual cities and towns. Since it is public information, AAA would surely rely on the Census Bureau.

Is the Census unreliable? Possibly so. But here we are at odds, as we have AAA probably depending on the Census, and the Census Bureau of odds with AAA. That’s a contradiction.

Does a city’s population only include people within the official boundaries of that city? If so, then many people are left uncounted. However, this seems a sloppy oversight, and anyway, cities like Denver are part of Metropolitan Statistical Areas, so that its population can include all surrounding areas, like Longmont, Aurora, Littleton, etc. Surely areas outside city boundaries are not uncounted either in the census, and probably not in the Atlases.

Are my numbers unreliable? That’s possible, of course. I took all of the cities and towns and broke them down into 13 groups of 20, and then added and re-added each group on my ten-key until I got the same number twice, then adding all those together for the state total of 399,136. And keep in mind that in college I was fastest in my class on a ten-key. Everybody has to be good at at least one thing, and that was my one special skill. So I think my numbers accurately represent AAA.

I am going to leave it there for others to speculate about. Keep in mind, the idea that atlases don’t reflect actual populations was a seed planted in my mind a long time ago. It has taken me this long to actually sit down with our least-populated state.