Just as “water regulation” was the focus of the Reform Era, “water retention” must be the focus of our time, according to environmental historian Lajos Rácz. In an article sent to Válasz Online, the professor at the University of Szeged explains that, just as in the 1830s and 1840s, Hungarian society is currently under significant ecological pressure, which poses a risk not of rapid collapse but rather of slow decline. One of the main remedies is deep-floodplain water recharge in the Great Hungarian Plain, but “in terms of scale and significance, this would likely rival the 19th-century railway construction projects.”