Historical climatic and environmental pressures and societal responses have varied markedly. Connecting climatic changes to social transformations is not an invention of the modern age. Commentators since antiquity have attributed political and economic changes to extreme weather events. But while explanations for rapid change or catastrophic events were based within the cultural logic of the impacted society, past societies also learned to manage their environments within the limits of their technology and their beliefs and generally understood how to manage their resources sustainably. We offer examples of how premodern societies dealt with or responded to long- and short-term environmental and climatic challenges, including their ability or their failure to foresee and mitigate them. We also look at questions of how societal responses included measures contributing to both resilience and sustainability. Finally, we draw out some generalizable lessons about past responses and behaviors and the ways in which these have contributed, positively and negatively, to the development of more recent and contemporary understanding of and policies toward the impacts of climate change.