paulr:
If you're walking down Main Street, you won't get suddenly swept off by a cyclone like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, and dropped onto Gilligan's Island where you'd be in big trouble if you didn't always carry a 10 inch Bowie knife good for hacking through jungle with.

Doug Ritter, "Gear and Equipment", section "On Your Own":
At its most basic, being "equipped to survive" means recognizing that what you have on your person may be all that you have available to assist you in coping with an emergency. No matter if your survival circumstance occurs in a city or in the wilderness, no matter how much equipment you may have in a survival kit stored at home, in the car, at work, in the plane or in the boat, it could easily come down to what you are personally carrying. You may be eternally grateful to have survived with just that much.

I've apparently given the impression I'm worried that I can't carry one of my large knives with me at all times. Actually, I could... Our CCW permit allows knives. That's not the point. All I'm wondering is what sorts of tasks are hard to do / impossible to do with a small knife that would be required in an emergency, and is there anything that can be done to compensate?