A DW crew tracks the people trying to make the gem trade less destructive. In German rivers, conservationist Wolfgang Degelmann breeds freshwater pearl mussels, a species with a 230-million-year history that royal jewelry all but wiped out in a century, aiming to reintroduce them to their old habitat. On Fiji's Savusavu coast, Justin Hunter runs a black-lip pearl oyster farm under strict environmental rules, betting that an intact reef is the only way to grow pearls naturally, while the oysters themselves filter hundreds of liters of seawater a day and locals who depend on tourism and fishing get pulled into the conservation effort. In the Austrian Alps, twin brothers Hannes and Gerhard Hofer spend days hiking into unexplored caves to extract crystals under quantity limits meant to protect the rock formations. Designer Helge Maren Hauptmann closes the film making the case for lab-grown diamonds, which she says are chemically identical to mined stones without the environmental cost.