There are a few multi-generational stewards of land, and there are a lot more multi-generational users of land. Let's not romanticize the fact that at the end of the day, the goal for most is still to make enough money to at least survive on, if not get wealthy. I have a hard time buying the true "steward" angle from anyone who still has to turn a profit from their land. The few true stewards I know manage land as a hobby, having made their money elsewhere. So if they need to rest an area from grazing, they do. If they need to rest it for 10-20 years to allow plant diversity to recover, they will. Land management, like so many other businesses, runs the entire spectrum from horrible to outstanding. But that doesn't keep even the sub-standard managers from tossing around the word "steward" as if they know what that means. I've heard too many owners of overgrazed highly degraded lands say nobody can do as good a job of managing that land as they can. I think we all have.
Another thing to consider is that this generation and the one before it and in most cases even the one before it, don't even know what that land looked like pre-contact. So they can easily be fooled into thinking they are really restoring something when in fact it has lost so much of its original character (soil, seed bank, hydrology) that it may never be fully restored.
That said, this comment I completely agree with -
