Josef Vavroušek was born on 15 September 1944 in Prague. He graduated at Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in 1962-1967 (study field of Economics and Management of Engineering Production, worked as an assistant researcher with doc. RNDr. Alfons Bašta). He was involved in the ecological movement already in the 1970s, most significantly in the Ecological Section of the Biological Society of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. In September 1992, he founded the voluntary non-profit NGO Society for Sustainable Life (STUŽ).
After his tragic death in 1995, the Charter 77 Foundation began to award the Josef Vavroušek Prize in his memory "for active promotion of a sustainable way of life, for activities aimed at positive solutions to interrelated ecological, social, economic and other problems, or for an exceptional act or activity in the field of environmental protection and sustainable development". Since 2014, the Partnership Foundation has been awarding this prize.
Josef Vavroušek was remembered exclusively for CTU by his long-time friend and colleague Pavel Šremer, who worked with him in the Federal Committee for the Environment and co-founded STUŽ:
Systems Engineer
In systems theory, the relationships between the parts of a system are very important for describing the system, not just the description of those parts. Already as a student at Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Josef Vavroušek helped as an auxiliary scientific force (so called "pomvěd") under guidance of doc. RNDr. Alfons Bašta, a mathematician, who developed the theory of decision making by the concept of the inner world of the decision maker as an important personality in decision making. This influenced Josef for his whole life, first in his modelling work, which he published as a researcher in 1974 in the publications "Model of an industrial enterprise management system and its applications" and "Modelling of complex decision-making processes". From the industrial enterprise, he went on to even more complex modelling, so that in his 1989 book Modelling Biological and Social Objects, in addition to the holistic modelling of the industrial enterprise, he also models the human organism, the city and the ecological system of Czechoslovak society. The latter was then an important scientific basis for the work of the newly established Federal Committee for the Environment (FCEE), which Josef was instrumental in establishing, and was also the basis for Josef's seminal synthetic publication "Environment and Self-Management of Society" in 1990, which we at the FCEE directly followed.
Josef's qualifications as a systems engineer were also very valuable during the negotiations on the departure of Soviet troops in 1990-1992. Firstly, in the negotiations on the compensation of ecological damage caused by the activities of the occupying army. At that time, the representatives of the republic's ministries of the environment wanted to negotiate basically only about the damage caused by groundwater contamination. I was pleasantly surprised by Josef to receive from him a systematic list of damages to be claimed. Because he also demanded the identification of damage to nature, the researches of then undernourished state nature protection were supported and new valuable sites for nature protection were identified in addition to the damages incurred. Although compensation for the damages was not achieved in the interest of having the Soviet troops withdraw as soon as possible, Josef, as a systems engineer, saw the need to deal with the consequences of the occupation troops, and so he initiated the creation of the Office for Dealing with the Consequences of the Soviet Troops' Presence on the Territory of the Czechoslovak Republic in September of 1991.
Photo courtesy of: Partnership Foundation archives