Rebecca Watson, Interior's assistant secretary for such things, notes that the price of oil is set on world markets, affected more by who is in power in Venezuela or who is in jail in Russia than by who is in search of oil in Utah's Book Cliffs. So, she says, the Wilderness Society is wrong when it suggests that American oil companies want to lock down oil leases throughout the West and conveniently forget to drill on them.

Watson might be right about that. Except she's also made the case that there is no rational incentive for the American people to encourage, or even allow, the quarterly leasing of thousands more acres of the land we all own to people who might or might not sink a lot of new oil wells.

And except that oil companies can be less worried about the price of oil than they are about the price of their own stock. And holding thousands of leases on millions of acres of cheaply rented federal land is just the kind of thing oil executives can point to as a reason why their company's stock is worth more than it was when they bought it.

An extreme example of that is how the market value of Shell Oil tanked in recent months when it turned out that company executives had vastly overstated the amount of oil reserves it controlled.

Inflating supposedly proven reserves is a much more serious matter than sitting on unproven, perhaps worthless, leases. But either way the idea is to make the company look as though it can produce more oil and gas than it really can, boosting its stock price, instead of actually producing any, which could depress the price of its product.

Totally left out of all these calculations is the supposed owner of all that land and the wealth that may lie underneath: You.

The reason for leasing so many parcels, according to Interior's reading of federal law, is to feed the nation's demand for energy, at a reasonable price, from sources close to home. But, Watson allows, federal law also allows those leases to be slowed whenever Bureau of Land Management plans suggest a reason to do so.

Watson's newly ordered reviews of how oil and gas exploration affects wildlife, which likely will slow such development in Wyoming, is an example of how Interior has the authority to put some thought into the process.

Wondering whether it is fair or even half-way logical to continue to issue oil and gas leases - when an Associated Press analysis shows that two-thirds of land already leased has produced no oil or gas - would be another point for the caretakers of our land to seriously ponder.