Hawk on Wire is a record of ecological disaster caused by global heating, and informed prophecy of what will happen unless humanity changes. Starbuck blends history, climate science updates, personal activism, and poetic imagination to paint that “reality” currently affecting island nations, millions of current climate refugees, and vanishing ecological community we share in land, sea, and sky. The book includes a series of imagined ghosts speaking about climate change (Mark Twain, Socrates, Ed Abbey, Mother Teresa, Galileo, Bukowski, T’ao Ch’ien, Rilke, Orwell, and Martha, the last passenger pigeon who died 1914 in Cincinnati Zoo).