Leaf Blowers and Entropy

The other day, the gardeners were in our neighbor's back yard and blowing away at the leaves.  As they usually do, they try to corral the leaves in one corner of the yard where they can then scoop them up and haul them off somewhere.  Unfortunately, when they blow them up against the fence that separates them from our yard, a good deal of the leaves and other debris ends up in our yard.  So yes, I am one of those people that thinks that leaf blowers are a bad idea.
But that is not my main point here.  My point is to talk about a definition of entropy that sees it as a degree of disorder.  In this view, entropy is created when the world becomes more disordered.  The gardener with the leaf blower lowers the entropy in his client's back yard but increases the overall entropy of the neighborhood by expending energy to create more order in a specific place at the cost of the larger environment.
This is how living organisms operate as well.  They hold entropy at bay internally by increasing overall entropy in their environment.  And it is only by holding entropy at bay by sucking energy out of their environment that living organisms can stay alive.
Still, it would be good if gardeners could work out a better way to remove leaves than by leafblowing and still put food on their table.

Low Entropy Boat Building

Entropy has generally had a lot of bad press.  Entropy is seen as something undesirable, as a general increase of disorder in the universe.  But, as people like Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine have been pointing out, order in the universe is created by burning energy and creating entropy.  You get a local decrease in entropy or increase in order and organization by a larger net increase in entropy.
So things like culture and technology arise from the burning of energy and the creation of entropy. So if more entropy also means more order and organization, why should we opt for low entropy boat building? That is, why should we do things like build skin boats instead of plastic roto-molded boats?  Interesting question, I think.  While hi-tech (high entropy) boat building produces some fabulous boats, lo-tech (low entropy) boat building is a hedge against energy scarcity.  That is, sometimes it is interesting to design boats for low energy scenarios, for environments where energy is scarce, or for some reason or other, you just don't want to use a lot of energy for esthetic reasons like you don't like the noise that high entropy machinery makes.