This interstitial was part of the documentary, EcoViews: Reclaiming the Bay, which was produced by American University film students. It was originally aired on April 19, 2009 on Maryland Public Television as part of its annual Chesapeake Bay Week of programming, and it won an award for Outstanding Environmental Production at the 2009 Visions Film Festival at American University.

The general focus of the documentary and this interstitial was the negative effects of dead zones on the ecological health of the Chesapeake Bay. Dead zones are areas in a body of water where the level of oxygen is so low that marine life can not be sustained, and a significant contributory factor to the development of dead zones is runoff of harmful nutrients such as phosphorous and nitrogen from the Bay’s vast watershed.

Much of the nitrogen runoff comes from agricultural sources, and this interstitial provides an idea of the scale of the problem and identifies a couple of new agricultural practices such as buffer zones of trees and foliage between water and agricultural plots that can help mitigate the amount of nitrogen runoff. The photographs in the interstitial show examples of buffer zones as well as agricultural land adjacent to bodies of water. And the main animated graphic is a timeline that plots the level of nitrogen in the Bay over recent years.