At first sight, environmental issues do not seem to feature prominently, if at all, in the work of Jacques Derrida. This essay aims to take a closer look, and thereby to issue a challenge to the burgeoning discipline of eco-criticism. Instead of promoting the Beautiful Soul who is equipped to save the planet by virtue of reading poetry, I argue for the ethical primacy of waste and welter (to recycle a phrase from Wallace Stevens). Jonathan Bate's The Song of the Earth, a powerful but pious work of eco-criticism, ends with a test proposed to the reader; I take the test, which entails reading Stevens's late poem ‘The Planet on the Table’, and fail. Bate's invocation of Martin Heidegger is briefly examined, as are traces of Derrida. What remains of Derrida, I propose, is neither method nor concept but rather remainders that trouble the grounding of environment (Umwelt) as such.
