Biography
Howie Hawkins has been active in movements for peace, justice, the environment, and independent progressive politics 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 was a co-founder of the anti-nuclear Clamshell Alliance in 1976. He remains a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and Veterans for Peace.
Howie was 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 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 now works unloading trucks and rail cars at UPS, where his is 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.
His 2005 run for Mayor of Syracuse put the question of a municipally owned power utility for affordable and green energy on the agenda of the city, which is currently funding a feasibility study of public power. He remains active in the Public Power Coalition of Central New York.
Howie's 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, Roll Call, Society and Nature, and Z Magazine. He is the editor of Independent Politics: The Green Party Strategy Debate (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006).
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