In light of the challenges posed by contemporary environmental changes, interest in past environmental impacts and societies’ responses to them is burgeoning. The main strength of such research lies in its ability to analyze completed society-environment interactions. Scholars have argued that such analyses can improve our understanding of present challenges and offer useful lessons to guide adaptation responses. Yet despite considerable differences between past and present societies, our inherently limited knowledge of the past and our changing understanding of it, much of this research uses historical antecedents uncritically, assuming that past societal impacts and responses are directly analogous to contemporary ones. We argue that this approach is unsound both methodologically and theoretically, thus drawing insights that might offer an erroneous course of action.

To illustrate the challenges in drawing historical analogies, we outline several fundamental differences between past and present societies as well as broader limitations of historical research. Based on these points, we argue that scholars who apply historical inference in their work should do so critically, while reflecting on the objectives of learning from the past and the limitations of this process. We suggest a number of ways to improve past-present analogies, such as defining more explicitly what we can learn from the past, clarifying the rationale for using the analogy, and reducing the number of variables compared between past and present.

鉴于当代环境变化带来的挑战，人们对过去的环境影响和社会对它们的反应的兴趣正在迅速增长。此类研究的主要优势在于其分析已完成的社会-环境相互作用的能力。学者们认为，此类分析可以提高我们对当前挑战的理解，并提供有用的经验教训来指导适应反应。然而，尽管过去和现在的社会之间存在很大差异，我们对过去的固有知识有限以及我们对它的不断变化的理解，但这项研究的大部分都在不加批判地使用历史先例，假设过去的社会影响和反应与当代的直接相似。我们认为这种方法在方法论和理论上都是不健全的，

为了说明绘制历史类比的挑战，我们概述了过去和现在社会之间的几个根本差异，以及历史研究的更广泛的局限性。基于这些观点，我们认为在工作中应用历史推理的学者应该批判性地这样做，同时反思从过去学习的目标和这一过程的局限性。我们提出了一些改进过去-现在类比的方法，例如更明确地定义我们可以从过去学到什么，阐明使用类比的基本原理，以及减少过去和现在之间比较的变量数量。