This piece was originally published in Yale E360 and appears here as part of our Climate Desk collaboration. At the southeast tip of a large valley in the northern Sierra Madre Oriental is the small Mexican town of Estanque de Norias, some 200 miles west of the Texas border at Laredo. Mountains rise up around the scrubby, treeless terrain like undulating brown walls. The star of this parched landscape is Agave asperrima, whose rosettes of impressive thick, blue-gray leaves edged with large, sharp teeth can grow four feet high and…
