All of which stopped me cold.

I thought I was inured to social media abuse. But this was something new: a calm public discussion about how to find me and what to do to me. No one deleted the comment by “gnomish.” The conversation just kept spiraling along.

I know that this is much worse for women; I shudder to think what Christine Blasey Ford’s email has been like lately. I know enough American history to understand that for people of color the deed has followed the threat with chilling regularity. I know that it’s worse in other places — 207 environmentalists or defenders were killed last year around the world. I have no idea if these people actually wish to murder me, though it’s disconcerting to imagine who among those millions of visitors to the site will read the comments and decide to drive to my house.

But aside from my own fear — and I’m now installing surveillance cameras, because it turns out that public death threats slash through some of the psychic insulation privilege provides — what really bothered me was the matter-of-factness of it all. What does it say about a society when people just routinely call for the killing of those they disagree with? You’ll note that “gnomish” abbreviated his profane phrase, because curse words are banned on this website. But its moderators apparently just read right past the death threat.

Threatening to kill or rape someone shouldn’t be banal. It should shock everyone who comes across such a threat. And that should go without saying, except that increasingly it doesn’t, not in a world where the president has said that he longed for the days when disruptive protesters were carried away from the scene “on a stretcher. ” It’s perversely heartening to see that the apparent murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi seems to have temporarily interrupted business as usual. Such shock and outrage is crucial, because in a world where dissenters are dismembered, there’s no hope for change. The prospect that you’ll be killed for what you say makes discussion essentially impossible. A society in which critics fear death is a society with fewer critics, and hence with fewer chances for change.

I count nonviolence as perhaps the greatest invention of the 20th century, above all because it opens up the possibility for conversion, not domination. That was the point of my op-ed essay, the one that garnered me the death threat. But we should practice nonviolence in ways small as well as large, prosaic as well as dramatic.

In the case of Watts Up With That, I’d made the effort at de-escalation myself. A few years ago, I was scheduled to give an organizing talk in the small California town where the website’s proprietor, Anthony Watts, lived. So I contacted him and invited him out for a beer. I knew I wouldn’t change his mind on climate change, and he knew I would continue to think his work involved wrecking the planet. But it always seems like a human idea to reach out.

And it was fine. We had a couple of beers, he wrote up an account of our conversation for his website, and even most of the commenters saluted us for sitting down and talking. (It was odd enough that it even got covered in The Times). But given the political world in which we live, a world in which tribes divide up and then beat their chests, it wasn’t long before things were back to new ugly normal.

I don’t want this website shut down; I don’t want the people who write on it prosecuted. I definitely don’t want them murdered. I just want — as the very beginning of some kind of return to the gentler old normalcy — for people to stop making death threats. That seems to me the least we can ask of one another.

Bill McKibben, a founder of 350.org, teaches environmental studies at Middlebury College and is the author of the forthcoming book “Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?”

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