Questions and comments for me personally should be emailed to medintz@idir.net. Questions for group discussion should be posted to the newsgroup misc.survivalism. All suggestions for revisions or additions should be emailed, as I can not check misc.survivalism on a regular basis anymore.
Note: misc.survivalism has a considerable number of foreign readers, and they may be confused by some of my terms relating to structure of society or government. In all cases not explicitly spelled out, you should assume that I have the United States in mind.
1) What the hell is TEOTWAWKI??
It means "The End of the World as we Know It" just like the REM song says. I don't know who first invented the term, but some people in m.s seem to think I did it. If so, I apologize for making everybody learn another acronym. :-)
That answer probably isn't much help to you, so let me put it another way: As the term is most commonly used on misc.survivalism, TEOTWAWKI refers to a period of time in the future in which much of the current social structure will break down-no police departments and no courts; no ambulances that you'd want to rely on; not much food distribution to speak of; possibly a massive rise in violent crime rates; major increases in infant mortality and plagues...try and picture the worst years of the Great Depression bundled with the rioting that plagued many American cities during the late 1960's, and you'll have a reasonably good general idea.
(An alternate idea would be to try and imagine Beiruit, Lebanon, only without Israeli and Syrian soldiers wrecking the place further and no Summerfield Hotel for us to check into and send our bar bills to the Washington Post)
2) So, what could cause TEOTWAWKI?
It could stem from any number of causes. During the 1980's, nuclear war was a favorite scenario, for instance. It was thought that a nuclear attack on Washington DC and other major cities would so disrupt American (and global) society that order would not be maintained.
Some have hypothesized that a large-scale crop failure in the US could trigger TEOTWAWKI worldwide, since the US is the world's largest food producer overall. During the summer of 1996, this was a hot topic of discussion in misc.survivalism. Geri Guidetti of the Ark Institute was quite active in the newsgroup then, posting her grain supply updates which painted a somewhat grim picture of the state of affairs of the world's food supply (and incidentally getting most of us interested in organic gardening)
Some people believe that these events will be brought about by a government crackdown on some domestic political group, leading to civil war. Various flavors of this theory include the UN, the Learned Elders of Zion, a worldwide banking conspiracy, 'International Socialism' or the like as the secret conspiracy causing the government to do the cracking-down. I don't happen to buy any of it-IMHO these theories range from highly improbable, to highly improbable with a lot of racist trash added)
Another guess floating around about what will bring on TEOTWAWKI is 'economic event' AKA depression. During the last Great Depression in the US, a large number of people lost homes and the general standard of living fell badly. Now, the world's economy is far more integrated and therefore considerably more vulnerable to a deliberate attack (see Clancy's _Debt of Honor_ for one possible scenario). We also have that much farther to fall. Currently, the US is far deeper in debt than we were in 1930, which could hypothetically lead to collapse-unlike 1930, most of the world economy is very tightly pegged to the US economy. US currency is the most widely- accepted in the world, and a collapse of the dollar could possibly have a number of shocks of it's own.
One variation on this theme is the so-called y2k crisis. Many of the computers used for storage and manipulation of financial data have a bug called the 'milennium bug.' THis bug only allows a two-digit date and therefore causes them to see the date as dd/mm/yy rather than dd/mm/yyyy. What that means is that when the date rolls over from 1999 to 2000, the computer just sees 99 and then 00, causing it to think that the date is 01/01/1900 instead of 01/01/2000. Now, try and imagine what your bank account would look like if you suddenly lost 99.999 years worth of compound interest.
What that means is that records stored or manipulated by computers with this programming error will be meaningless, if they require knowing the correct date in order to function properly.
Yet another guess seems like science fiction. Approximately 65 million years ago, a comet hit the Earth with two major effects: It created the hole in the ground that we now call the Gulf of Mexico, and it lead to the extinction of the then-dominant dinosaurs in short order. A similar 'dinosaur killer' impact today would, if it struck water, cause massive tidal waves, increase in cloud cover, temperature drop, and earthquakes. This would result in the destruction of coastal and low-lying areas, greatly shortened growing seasons, and major social disruption resulting from the disruption of agriculture and commerce. A land impact would probably be considerably less severe, in that it wouldn't put as much extra water vapor into the air and therefore not have as much of a disruption of agriculture. (Still, being under where the thing hits would probably suck in a way that few things have ever sucked before)
One interesing note about this is that NASA scientists announced in March of 1998 that they found an asteroid that would pass VERY close to the Earth in the year 2028. How close could not be immediately determined, and will probably be subject to considerable revision as more data becomes available, but a collision between the Earth and any other large body will have the same approximate impact as a surface detonation of a VERY large nuclear bomb, minus the radioactive fallout. That means major devastation and earthquakes near the impact site ('near' being relative to the size of the rock and the velocity of the rock relative to the Earth...for a rock measured in billions of tons at normal orbital velocities, an impact in New York could very likely trigger some nasty quakes in Kansas City or worse.) A more-detailed treatment of this matter may be seen in Larry Niven's novel "Lucifer's Hammer." The book is fiction, but on examination the science looks reasonably sound.