are themselves 'natural' because they are made by humans. Deep ecologists have indicated that the concept of technics being 'natural' and therefore 'morally neutral' is a delusion of industrial civilization: there can be nothing 'neutral' about nuclear weapons, for instance, whose sole purpose is large scale destruction. Historian Lewis Mumford, divides technology into 'democratic' and 'authoritarian' technics ('technics' includes both technical and cultural aspects of technology). While 'democratic' technics, available to small communities, may be neutral, 'authoritarian' technics, available only to large-scale, hierarchical, authoritarian, societies, are not. Such technics are not only unsustainable, but 'are driving planetary murder'. They need urgently to be abandoned, as supported by point #6 of the deep ecology platform. With reference to the degree to which landscapes are natural, Peter Wohlleben draws a temporal line (roughly equivalent to the development of Mumford's'authoritarian' technics) at the agricultural revolution, about 8000 BC, when "selective farming practices began to change species." This is also the time when the landscape began to be intentionally transformed into an ecosystem completely devoted to meeting human needs. Concerning Hobbes's pronouncement on 'the state of nature', deep ecologists and others have commented that it is false and was made simply to legitimize the idea of a putative 'social contract' by which some humans are subordinate to others. There is no evidence that members of primal societies, employing 'democratic technics', lived shorter lives than those in civilization (at least before the 20th century); their lives were the opposite of solitary, since they lived in close-knit communities, and while 'poverty' is a social relation non-existent in sharing cultures, 'ignorant' and 'brutish' both equate to the term 'savage' used by colonials of primal peoples, referring to the absence of authoritarian technics in their cultures. Justice, political liberty and altruism are characteristic of egalitarian primal societies rather than civilization, which is defined by class hierarchies and is therefore by definition unjust, immoral, and lacking in altruism. Links with other philosophies Arne Naess stated that the main philosophical influence on his life and work was Spinoza. 'When I was seventeen I read Spinoza's 'Ethics' he said, '... I was inspired by [his] view of human nature or essence: our nature or essence is such that we are pleased at other's pleasure and feel sad about other's sadness. Kindness and love activate our nature; best of all, they activate all aspects of ourselves.' Peter Singer critiques anthropocentrism and advocates