Across rural Maine, there’s a notion that newcomers to the state are destroying its culture and traditions. That isn’t true.

Maine’s roots remain strong — wherever you go, you don’t have to look far to find independent-minded people who will rally to their community’s needs.

And yet there really is something that is eroding the links between our past and our future. More and more, we don’t care about our history. The enemy, as Walt Kelly’s Pogo understood, is us.

Many of us are so busy with our screens and our efforts to scrape by that we don’t devote time to the organizations, causes and needs that tie our communities together. When a community benefits from the participation of people, it becomes like an old-fashioned quilt: knitting all the disparate pieces into something comforting, something that lasts.

You can see the collective drift away from that way of life by looking at what’s happened to the many historical societies in Maine’s small towns, as reporter Rose Lincoln did recently for the Bethel Citizen.

The West Paris Historical Society, during the Nixon administration, enjoyed the membership of about three-quarters of the town’s population. Today, membership of the organization devoted to recording and celebrating the town’s rich history has narrowed to about 15 aging members.

It’s the same story at almost every historical society, where dwindling groups of gray-haired Mainers try to care for collections built up over generations and to preserve the stories of our ancestors.

Some of this trend is no doubt due to the simple reality that struggling communities lack the resources to keep up with the demands imposed by the maintenance of collections and of buildings that require more energy and money than are easily obtained by volunteers.

But I think it goes deeper than that. We tend to take care, after all, of what matters to us.

As someone who is captivated by history, surrounded at home by books and knicknacks, I may not be the best one to figure out why so many of my fellow citizens don’t care much anymore. But in my capacity as an unpaid member of the advisory panel for the state archives and in my volunteering with the Androscoggin Historical Society, I have spent some time trying to figure it out.

What I’ve come to realize is that when people and organizations are barely holding on, we don’t provide the public support they need to continue.

If we want to preserve our past, we have to cough up the cash to pay for building maintenance and the preservation of documents and historical items that highlight our collective story. And we just don’t do nearly enough of that.

We can’t assume that somehow the photographs, diaries, maps, books and other records of preceding generations will always exist for our descendants as they have for us. We either take steps to protect them or they will be gone.

I find that prospect worse than tragic. Our past defines us and it grounds us. Knowing and understanding where we came from is central to figuring out where we’re going.

All of us can do some things: become a member of your local historical society, offer to lend it some of your time or your expertise.

But our government ought to make it a priority to do better at finding the funds that are so badly needed at scores of historical societies across Maine, from the tiniest towns to the Maine Historical Society, which has an astonishingly rich collection stretching back to the Popham colony.

After all, as philosopher George Santayana wrote more than a century ago, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”