As the New York Green Party's candidate for Governor in 2010, he campaigned for progressive taxes and revenue sharing as the alternative to Andrew Cuomo's cuts to schools, cities, and public services. He received nearly 60,000 votes, which gave the Green Party a ballot line statewide for the next four years. Hawkins came in third out of seven gubernatorial candidates on the 2010 ballot.

A former Marine, Hawkins helped organize opposition to the Vietnam War. In the 1970s and 1980s, he was a leader in the anti-apartheid divestment movement to end US corporate investment in the system of racist labor exploitation in South Africa.

After attending Dartmouth College in the early 1970s, Howie worked in construction in New England and helped organize a worker cooperative that specialized in energy efficiency and solar and wind installations.

When the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs, A. Philip Randolph, Helen Keller, and Norman Thomas re-established itself in 1973, Howie joined. He is also a member of the socialist organization, Solidarity.

He was a co-founder of the anti-nuclear Clamshell Alliance in 1976 and the Green Party in the US in 1984.

He moved to Syracuse in 1991 to develop cooperatives for CommonWorks, a federation of cooperatives that worked in the 1990s for an economy that is cooperatively owned, democratically controlled, and ecologically sustainable. Today he serves as secretary of the board of the Eat to Live Food Cooperative and supports the New York Cooperative Network. He is also a board member of the Southside Community Coalition. 

Hawkins was active in the campaigns to establish the Citizens Review Board in the 1990s and the Living Wage Ordinance in the 2000s in Syracuse. As the Syracuse Green Party's candidate for Mayor in 2005, Howie's campaign succeeded in putting public power – a city-owned power utility – on the city's agenda. 

Hawkins works at UPS unloading trucks, where he is a member of Teamsters Local 317 and active in Teamsters for a Democratic Union, US Labor Against the War, and the Labor Campaign for Single Payer Healthcare.

His articles on politics, economics, and environmental issues have appeared in Against the Current, CounterPunch, Green Politics, International Socialist Review, Labor Notes, New Politics, Peace and Democracy News, Z Magazine, and other publications. He is the editor of Independent Politics: The Green Party Strategy Debate (Haymarket Books, 2006).