While the causes of Islamist terrorism are clearly multifaceted, most reasonable people would acknowledge that the terrible injustice experienced by the Palestinian people has been a contributing factor. Yet Western governments cannot say as much because of the importance of their continuing commitment to Israel.

It is true that a crisis focuses our attention on a particular problem. But crises are also telling us that something more fundamental is wrong, either with particular organisations or with the systems of which they are a part. The trouble is that our understanding of these systems is either limited, or contested, or both. And what you see depends very much upon your point of view.

The world financial crisis is a good example of this. From one perspective, the crisis occurred because governments meddled incompetently in financial markets in order to promote economic growth.

From another, the crisis occurred not because of too much regulation, but because of too little. According to this view, governments should no longer subscribe to the view that capital markets are self-regulating, and should exercise much closer surveillance over the activities of the more slippery kinds of financial entrepreneurs such as hedge fund operators and mortgage brokers.

At another level, it might be argued that tighter regulation is doomed to failure, because the incentives for clever (or desperate) people to evade it are so strong.

We know that capitalism is a system of booms and busts. Credit proliferates during the booms and dries up during the busts. What has changed is that, in many Western countries, the levels of consumption that are needed to drive the rates of growth that are considered desirable can be supported only by massive borrowing. So there is a ready demand for ever more creative forms of financial intermediation.

We might go further still, and ask how it is that, far from becoming more stable, capitalism seems more crisis-prone than ever. We are taught to celebrate globalisation but it is clearly not above criticism. If we look at the way development is occurring, the global economic system appears to be seriously out of balance. China grows at rates that are clearly unsustainable, while too many other countries still languish in poverty.

We tend to see our crises as entirely separate from each other, but it may be fruitful to ask about their interconnections. Climate change may not be a completely different kind of problem from the financial crisis, but a variation on the same theme.

Rather than seeing greenhouse gases as an unfortunate by-product of economic growth, to be abated by emissions trading schemes or carbon taxes or whatever, perhaps we should be paying more attention to the politico-economic realities that determine where, when and how growth occurs.

Countries such as China, India and Brazil need to grow so that they can raise living standards. No one questions this. But the reason they grow so erratically and unsustainably is because they do such a poor job of supporting their poorest citizens. Growth of this intensity in such populous countries pours greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at rates that overwhelm adaptive capacities the classic recipe for recurrent crises in the future.

Slower, more measured growth would take the stress off the environment, and benefit many of the world's poorest people. It might also benefit the world's richer people as well. When we've finished having our current crises, maybe we can get down to some serious thinking about these questions.

Dr Jenny Stewart is associate professor of public policy at the University of Canberra.