Howie Hawkin's Biography
Howie Hawkins was the Green Party candidate for Mayor of Syracuse in 2005 in a campaign that succeeded in putting the issue of public power a city-owned gas and electric utility on the citys agenda.
Howie has been active in movements for peace, justice, and the environment since the late 1960s when he was in high school in the San Francisco Bay Area.
A former Marine, he helped organize opposition to the Vietnam War and remains a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He was a co-founder of the anti-nuclear Clamshell Alliance in 1976, a co-founder of the Green Party in the United States in 1984, and currently serves on the Green National Committee.
After attending Dartmouth College in the early 1970s, Howie worked as a carpenter in New England and helped start up a construction workers cooperative that specialized in energy audits and solar and wind energy installations.
Howie moved to Syracuse in 1991 to be Director of CommonWorks, a federation of cooperatives working for an economy that is cooperatively owned, democratically controlled, and ecologically sustainable.
Howie presently works unloading trucks and rail cars at UPS, where he is a member of Teamsters Local 317 and active in US Labor Against the War and Teamsters for a Democratic Union, the national Teamster rank-and-file reform caucus.
Howies articles on social theory, cooperative economics, and independent politics have appeared in many publications, including Against the Current, Green Politics, International Socialist Review, New Politics, Peace and Democracy News, Peaceworks, Resist, Society and Nature, and Z Magazine. He is the editor of Independent Politics: The Green Party Strategy Debate (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006).
