1. Introduction: what sort of past does our future need?.-  Part I: History and public policy in the era of planetary crisis.- 2. What stories should historians be telling at the dawn of the Anthropocene?.- 3. The Anthropocene contract. What kind of historian–reader agreement does environmental historiography need?.- 4. History and utopian thinking in the era of the Anthropocene.- 5. Potentials and risks of futurology: lessons from late socialist Poland.- 6. Globalization as adaptive complexity: learning from failure.- 7. Disjunctures of practice and the problems of collapse.- Part II: Climate change.- 8. Geoengineering and the Middle Ages: Lessons from medieval volcanic eruptions for the Anthropocene.- 9. A perfect tsunami? El Nino, War and Resilience on Aceh, Sumatra.- 10. Social Responses to Climate Change in a Politically Decentralized Context: A Case Study from East African History.- 11. Resilience at the Edge: Strategies of Small-Scale Societies for Long-Term Sustainable Living in Dryland Environments.- 12. Beyond Boom and Bust:  Climate in the History of Medieval Steppe Empires (c. 550-1350 CE).- 13. Lessons for Modern Environmental and Climate Policy from Iron Age South Central Africa.- Part III: Crisis and recovery.- 14. Systemic Risk and Resilience: The Bronze Age Collapse and Recovery.- 15. Panarchy and the Adaptive Cycle: A Case Study from Mycenaean Greece.- 16. Managing the Roman Empire for the long term: risk assessment and management policy in the fifth to seventh centuries.- 17. Success and Failure in the Norse North Atlantic: Origins, Pathway Divergence, Extinction and Survival.- 18.Resilience of coupled socio-ecological systems: historic rice fields of the U.S. south.- 19. The Short- and Long-Term Effects of an Early Medieval Pandemic.- Part IV: Migration and the environment.- 20. The integration of settlers into existing socio-environmental settings: reclaiming the Greek lands after the Late Medieval crisis.- 21. Eastward migration in European history: the interplay of economic and environmental opportunities.- 22. The Environmental Dimension of Migration: the case of Post-WWII Poland.- Part V: Conclusions.- 23. Concluding remarks: interdisciplinarity and public policy.