In this interview, we talk with Mike Schlebach, a founder of Protect the West Coast (PTWC), about the organization’s origins and impact. PTWC was started by a group of Cape Town-based surfers and environmentalists who became alarmed by the increasing threat of mining on the West Coast’s pristine beaches. Initially focused on raising public awareness, PTWC has since engaged in legal actions and community mobilization to protect these areas.
Mike discusses the ongoing damage caused by companies like MSR and Trans Hex, who have been granted mining rights with little oversight or public input. He highlights PTWC’s current initiatives, including the development of Ripl, an online portal designed to empower communities to oppose harmful mining projects.
This interview offers a look into the struggles and successes of PTWC, showcasing the critical work being done to protect one of South Africa’s last natural frontiers.
What made you start Protect the West Coast?
Mike Schlebach: There were a few of us that founded Protect the West Coast together. Basically just the group or regular users of the West Coast. None of us actually live up there.
Katja Mamacos: It’s mostly Cape Town based?
Mike: Yeah, we all are Cape Town based. In fact, our legal guy is from Durban. Before he got involved with Protect the West Coast, he’d never been up the West Coast! Now he’s been a few times. But yeah, it started with a small group of surfers that frequent the area and gradually became aware of all these new encroachments of the mining industry down into areas that were largely pristine and underdeveloped or with no development at all.
So I think it was like mid 2020 when we found out that there was a mining company, an Australian mining company called MSR that had just been given a stretch of coastline that included these 10 pristine beaches to mine. It was given to them without them having to go through a whole new mining application.
They have an existing mine there, a very big mine, and they just got this 10 beach extension approved. And that was out in the media a little bit. And that was a light bulb moment for a few people.
My involvement came a little while later when I just got out of a business that I founded. I had some time and energy and I took a trip up into that area and got to see for myself what was really going on up there.
The history of mining on the west coast is long, the diamond industry has been mining up in the Northern Cape area, on the beaches up there, for the last hundred odd years. But the creep is coming fast and furiously down the coastline.
A screenshot from this interactive map of the status of all known mineral extraction activities in the region
On your site it says there are 30+ applications.
Mike: Yeah, including prospecting applications. When you look at the maps at the moment, the West Coast is severely under siege.
Apart from inland mining on the West Coast, there’s the beach mining. And then you’ve got on the near shore — most of the coastline has been divided up into diamond concessions. And then you’ve got diamond concessions further out to sea and now they’ve got oil and gas out to sea as well, you know. So it’s just a complete shit show.
Katja: It really is! So did you start with the legal or the informing the public side of it?
Mike: Yeah, so for the first two years of PTWC’s existence, our main mandate was to bring what was happening on the West Coast from a mining perspective into the public domain.
Katja: Ja that whole coastline is very out of sight.
Mike: Out of sight, out of mind. There’s very few communities up there. And it’s not a big tourist area either, so we saw it as one of the last frontiers, as an area that we could go and visit, surf and free camp and do all these things that you can’t do anywhere else in the world. Yeah, not so much anymore. But there are also these communities up there that have been severely affected, especially in the northern regions, by the diamond mining industry.
And if you think about De Beers, which is the biggest diamond producer and seller in the world… They extracted all of the early billions from that Northern Cape area. And they’ve left that area completely unrehabilitated. Some of the community there, they’re some of the poorest in the country — some of those towns have like a 75% unemployment rate, and those were all diamond areas.
Why is it that the mining companies aren’t legally obligated to restore the area?
Mike: They are. The government, through the Department of Minerals and Energy, is supposed to be providing oversight. They are the same entity that is approving the applications, and then they’re supposed to provide oversight and things like that as it goes along, but they don’t do that. They don’t have the capacity and so it’s a complete free for all. The approvals and the applications historically have been woeful at best, in terms of the content of these applications. They’re copy and paste.
Katja: They really don’t have to put in much effort.
Mike: Ja, and then they’ll say, okay, we’ll give X amount to the local communities. We’ll have a one and a half million rand rehabilitation fund when they’re looking at a couple of billion rand mining site, and they’ll say we’ll provide X amount of jobs. But ultimately they don’t; nothing transpires as it should…
So PTWC was really about bringing the mining story on the West Coast into the public, and now it’s transitioning into a new phase. Last year we took one of the mining companies to court — Trans Hex, which has been mining on the West Coast for the last 60 or 70 years. And to date, we have not been able to find a single rehabilitated site that they’ve mined.
Katja: I saw you described it as a moonscape on your blog.
Mike: Yes! For example, the area between Hondeklip Bay and Alexander Bay. It’s a stretch of coastline that spans about 230 kilometers, and it’s been severely ravaged by the diamond mining industry. It’s not just De Beers, it’s De Beers, it’s Transhex, it’s Alex Core, which is a state owned entity.
And that area, if you drive through it, you can look in and see parts of it — it’s 230 kilometers long and about 20 or 30 kilometers wide. And it’s just… it looks like what I would think the moon looks like. And a lot of these companies are moving further and further south down the coastline.
In the middle of 2022, Transhex started mining the beaches of Dooringbaai. That’s why we took them to court, because there was no public engagement. No one knew who they were, they just showed up and started mining and it turns out that the Department of Minerals had given them a new permit to mine and we thought that was illegal.
The Tronox mine, by Jacque Smit
Katja: Yeah, without any community engagement.
So with the community engagement, I know you’re working on a comments and appeals portal. How’s that going?
Mike: Yes, Ripl! We’re calling it Ripl. And Ripl is in the final throes of coming to life. We are hoping to have it live in the next two weeks.
It’s been a two year project at least. A lot easier said than done, but it will be a first of its kind in South Africa. It’s a portal that allows the public to really engage with the mining sector on the West coast.
So when a new application comes in, we will get notified. We put it on the portal and the portal sends out an alert to everybody that signed up for it. And then people can go through the details of the application, everything will be there and then they can provide comments and appeals and things like that when the time is right.
Katja: That’s really great!
Mike: Yeah, it’s really great because historically the amount of people that engage with these applications, you can count on one hand. You get four or five people that are knowledgeable and they’ve been completely overwhelmed, because there’s just so much going on.
So now we’re looking to get hundreds, if not thousands of normal people just registering their views. And then, it’s a great opportunity for specialists and scientists and things like that, who know a lot about how these things should work to also have their say. It should make life much more difficult for both the government and for the mining applicants just to push these things through, because there’s this proper pushback.
Katja: Ja, because we also have a lot of people who know so much about our local environment, who would definitely get involved if it’s accessible.
Mike: Exactly, that’s the idea. And then we also want to take this opportunity to the youth. We want to go and roll this out at schools and get the youth involved. Because this is their future. Over the three and a half years since we’ve been in existence, we’ve had a lot of quite a bit of engagement from schools and youngsters at schools that are like, how can we help? How can we get involved? And this is a wonderful way for them to do that.
Katja: That’s fantastic. Because until now, every time a new application comes through, you have to find it and register as interested. This is really great, that interested parties can stay consistently involved.
Do you think it’ll be possible to roll it out in different parts of the country?
Mike: Absolutely, yeah we do. This portal was created by a local digital agency that has done it all pro bono — a digital agency called ibay. It’s taken a massive effort on their behalf and our behalf just to get it to where it is.
And the idea really is, like you’ve alluded to, to start with the West Coast and then gradually expand it. But there are costs involved. It’s SMS based, as we’re trying to appeal to the affected areas and affected people and communities that don’t have email and don’t have the internet. But they have a phone and they have SMS. And there’s a cost to an SMS, so if you’ve got tens of thousands of people doing this thing, it can cost quite a lot of money. but yeah, but that is the plan
Katja: And then put it on a subscription service for those who can afford it? Or how would you cover the cost?
Mike: We would get sponsors. We could maybe even get one of the big cell phone providers on board. It’s petty cash for them.
Katja: Okay, lovely. That’s really exciting!
You refer in your 2024 goals to a Strategic Environmental Assessment. What needs to happen to get the government to commit to doing that along the entire coast?
Mike: That’s a very good question. In the last few years we wrote to Barbara Creasy when she was the minister of environment and suggested a moratorium on mining until a strategic environmental assessment had been done. Because we feel that the government is flying completely blind. They’re approving all these applications ad hoc and when you look at the maps of where these things are, they’re all right next to each other or even on top of each other, and and they’re not taking into account the accumulative impacts of all of these things. If things carry on the way the they are then the coastline from at least Elands Bay all the way to Alexander Bay will be one big mining pit.
So yeah, the SEA should be commissioned by the government themselves, by the Minister of Environment or the DMRE. It’s not a small project — normally SEAs are done for a much smaller area. But we would encourage them to do one from all the way from Elands Bay all the way up to Alexander Bay and that’s a lot of money and takes a lot of time.
But yeah, we’ve encouraged them. We’re actually putting together a new letter for the new Minister of Environment. We’re going to be writing to him in the next two weeks. Again, just bringing his attention to what’s going on up there, and strongly suggesting the idea of an SEA.
The reality is that there are so many interested and affected parties on the coast that an SEA would really benefit, and if the government won’t get it done themselves, then potentially what we could do is just find the funding to initiate it ourselves.
And then, just get the government to agree to at least looking at it and using it as a tool to make informed decisions.
Katja: So why would it cost so much? What is involved?
Mike: It’s a lot of scientific data you’re looking at. So what an SEA really encompasses from my understanding, is it takes a look at how the West Coast should best be utilized from an economic perspective, from a social perspective, from a heritage perspective, and then also from an environmental perspective.
So if you could think of it like, mining in some areas is acceptable and can happen as long as it’s done legally and properly, and then you’ve got areas that are rich in biodiversity and that should be left untouched.
Katja: Because a lot of these areas where the plants are endemic and can’t be found anywhere else.
Mike: Yeah, there’s the golden mole up there that Leonardo DiCaprio posted about that is nowhere else — it lives on a 20 kilometer stretch of coastline. There’s plants up there, like you’ve alluded to, that don’t grow anywhere else in the world.
People think because it’s a semi arid, desert type of area that it’s barren. But it’s one of the richest, most biodiverse areas in the world.
Then there’s also agriculture, there’s tourism, there’s all these other factors that play a role. Those all need to be factored in and you need to go in there and collect all the data and do all this research. And it’s a big area, it’s a changing area, so it’s not all just copy and paste, so every area has got to be looked at individually and you’re probably looking at two years or so and ~10 million rand just to get that done properly.
Katja: That makes sense because it sounds like a really holistic overview.
Mike: Ja, and it’s the kind of thing that can be used for the next 50 years. So when you think about it in that context, and you think about all the people that it’s affecting and the environments that it’s affecting, then 10 million is nothing. 500,000 US dollars or something, it’s really doable.
Katja: And it’s something that maybe the mining companies themselves should be contributing to?
Mike: There is that too. Ja. But a lot of these mining houses are really, not B grade, but more like C grade mining operations. They’re there because they know they can get away with a lot. Mining legally and responsibly costs a lot of money, and a lot of these company don’t have that kind of money. So they’re here because they know that they can bribe government officials and they can get away with stuff and they don’t have to do what they say .
So what are some ways that readers can help with the West Coast? They can register as an interested party. Are there any other paths?
Mike: Look, yeah, it’s yeah when Ripl comes to life in the next couple of weeks people can register there. They can get involved that way. They can donate to our organization — the team that work at protect the West coast have been up until a few months ago doing this all pro bono and now they get paid a small stipend for their work.
But yeah, they can donate, they can engage with us on social media. If you’re a specialist or a scientist, as in geologists, marine biologists, etcetera, can always reach out to us and see how we can work together and collaborate. Then for the layman, really just sharing our stories and engaging where you can on social media. And if you’re a specialist in anything, a writer, journalist, whatever, you know helping tell our stories or your own stories, even, that’s great.
And then yeah, we sell merch on our website and all that kind of stuff. So if you want to support that way, that’s great too.
Tormin mining operation, by Jacque Smit
Katja: That’s great.
What is PTWCs biggest success story so far?
Mike: I think our biggest success story has been our media outreach, what we’ve done to highlight this plight, this issue. I think before we came into existence, it was probably a few thousand people that knew about it.
Katja: That even knew that it was happening at all.
Mike: Yeah. And then you’d probably go down to a few hundred, that actually saw the problem for what it is. Now millions of people know, and I think that’s been our biggest achievement by a long way.
And then the court case, for sure, we settled out of court and we stopped TransHex from mining in the Olifants River Estuary.
We’re also doing a lot of work with various different organizations like Cape Nature and Sanparks, to get the Olifants River Estuary deemed a conservation area, because there are actually, I think, three or four mining applications in the Olifants River Estuary at the moment. They’re not mining, but prospecting, which leads to mining.
And then Ripl and our community engagement, we’ve created community around this and a platform for the affected communities — we’ve given them a voice, or giving them a voice, we’re in process. And it’s the first time ever. Over the years there’s been activists or individuals in the communities that have been trying to push back against what’s happening up there, but it’s always been ad hoc and one at a time and individual, and now we’re providing a unified voice which has been really great.
Katja: Yeah, that’s fantastic.
Mike: The other sort of agenda, I suppose you could call it, is that we want to encourage other industries, more modern industries that fall under the nature-based solutions umbrella. Like algae farming, kelp farming, perlemoen farming, all those kinds of things that are non extractive, they’re circular and they could have a very healthy home on the West Coast. They have the opportunity to employ so many community locals, with long term, sustainable jobs, not just for as long as the mine exists.
Katja: That would be amazing. Is there any current movement in that direction?
Mike: Yeah, there is, but in typical South African government style, the red tape surrounding these things is massive. We know of several international kelp farming organizations that have tried to set up shop here and that have actually left because they couldn’t get it right, from a red tape and legislative perspective.
We’ve also been engaging and partnering with an organization called CH4. They want to create algae from seaweed. And a perfect plant for them could be set up on the coastline in an old mining dump site or mining site. A small plant could produce at least a thousand full time jobs. And then the bigger plants could produce like 4,000 jobs. And that’s creating biofuel for the shipping industry, which is also amazing.
Katja: Then it’s non extractive and it’s contributing positively. Yeah, that sounds incredible.
Mike: It is! And honestly, there’s enough diamonds in the world now to service whoever wants them. And there are better solutions.
And rehabilitation — we could set up some rehabilitation projects on old mining sites up there that could reestablish the fauna and flora that was there, and create jobs for people.
Katja: There’s so much more that could be done. Are there any restoration projects currently?
Mike: No, we pitched one to De Beers last year and they just flatly said no. They strung us along for a few months, the initial reaction to our proposal was, yes, this sounds like something we could get involved with, sounds like a great initiative and would do a lot of good for the area. Then they sold their last mine, and it changed to ‘we’re done here now, we don’t have to do anything else, it’s somebody else’s problem’.
Katja: That’s disappointing. Okay, so no projects yet, but if Protect the West Coast got greater funding, then there’s so much that you can still do there.
Mike: Ja exactly. We really see our role as a facilitator. We have great community engagement and we’ve learned from the communities that we’ve engaged with, that they are really desperate, they are some of the poorest communities in the country. A lot of them can’t even fish for their living because of government intervention, and there’s not a lot of farming because these are arid areas. And ja, the mining industry has turned their back on these communities by and large. And so nature based solutions are the way of the future. All of these guys are crying out for it, the powers that be need to see it for what it is.
So that’s our project, it’s really to firstly tell the world that this needs to happen, and then try and facilitate as best we can.
