Who understands that the Earth and its occupants are all connected to each other?

You may think of each person on Earth as a particle of a whole organism. We are the universe today. The particular arrangement that forces have "painted". It is our conditioning to see and judge our differences and allow our individual thought to separate us in to social stratification. Once we all realize our connection to one another, we can reach the next stage of civilization. This, however, is nearly impossible, as it has not happened within the time allotted in this age. We flourish and are destroyed by the planet forever, until we finally make the connection and disperse into further reaches, continually evolving. We can't get past "kindergarten".

Atoms can be destroyed, and are all the time. Thats how nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors function, by destroying atoms.

Atoms are just little balls of energy; they carry no information, nothing that tells you what they were part of. There is no connection between things because they may have shared time with any particular atom or another.

We are indeed all one. Animal-vegetable-mineral doesn't matter at this level. We are all the same stuff as the stars. All matter and energy can take on forms and these forms we call information. In Hermeticism there is the One mind and the One thing. The former being the information and the later being both matter and energy.

We're all closely related because of DNA.