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Joanna: But we cannot give up the understanding that we have become alienated from nature . . . .
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This is flatly false. In so far as we enter into capitalist relations (sell our labor power to a capitalist), we alienate X hours of our labor, that's all. When that worker goes home and eats a pizza from Kroger's she is no longer alienated from her own activity: she has a direct relationship to the pizza and to the oven she warms it in. "Capitalism" and "Capitalist Society" are NOT the same thing. And even capitalism just "aims" at being a totality but never achieves it. (I'll let Ian have fun with the literal absurdity of the preceding sentence.) But daily life as a whole is not a totality, which makes questionable the relevance of "alienation" in our "daily lives." In fact, "alienation" in any fundamental sense is so empty a concept that probably "free from alienation" is also empty.
Fredy Perlman argues that "commodity fetishism" in Marx's later works names the same actualities as "dalienation" does in his early work. That is probably correct, but I won't try to handle that here.
Nature leads us to what, in Peri Batous, Pope called The Profund, and mocks in the diving contest in Dunciad II, where he who dives the deepest comes up covered with shit.
Carrol