Labradorite is by far my favorite gemstone. Natural quartz crystal comes a close second. I have a quartz pendulum that is shot through with "angel hair" that is just beautiful!
What I am trying to say is that gemstones are all beautiful in there own way.
Diamonds are at best semi-precious but because the De Beers company controls the majority of the worlds diamond stock they are precious. They only trickle out diamonds onto the open market. After all scarcity always drives up demand. It was the De Beers campaigns of the 50's and 60's that secured diamonds firmly in the hearts of women. Thanks to them diamonds are indeed a girls best friend. If you buy a diamond it costs a lot. If you try to resell it you will get half of the sale value back if you are lucky Thanks to the De Beers stranglehold on the market.
To be truthful there is much conflict in the mining of any substance even if it is only against our beloved Gaia. Take gold for instance. Johannesburg used to be one large tract of farmland before the discovery of gold there. The largest man made mountains are around Johannesburg the deepest man made hole too.
From the archives of the Taipei times:
"Across the Witwatersrand reef, the long, narrow gold field running east to west just below downtown, there are about 240 of these huge dumps, covering 270km2 of once fertile earth.
Over the decades, the dumps have been both blights and hazards, so laden with heavy metals that few plants can survive on them; so unstable that dry winter winds can bathe the city in toxic dust clouds; so perilous that children periodically vanish in slides and cave-ins."
These mountains have been disappearing for well over a decade now due to contractors who are reprocessing the ore to extract even more gold. The main flocculant (chemical that separates the gold from the ore) used is Cyanide, mainly because it is so cheap.
For more information on this article here is a link:
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/ar ... 2003155063
This is not just happening in South Africa but everywhere gold is mined.
Just remember that there is a greater price to be payed with any precious material. Sad but true.