I have one resolution for 2005: Let’s get real.

1. A real calendar. A year should be elegant. But with 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 46 seconds, it’s a mathematical mess. Same for the months. Some have 30 days, some 31, and one has 28 when it doesn’t have 29. Only one month has four weeks. The other eleven have four weeks and change, which means that successive years can’t start on the same day.

And there’s nothing celestially special about seven days, named for the sun, moon and five planets known in ancient time. The seven-day week makes for 52.1428 weeks in a solar year and 50.571 weeks in a lunar year. Lunacy.

In short, our calendar lacks grace, art and accuracy. It’s a dysfunctional hybrid crossbred from the earth’s orbit of the sun (a year), the moon’s orbit of earth (a month), and the earth’s rotation (a day), which are badly out of sync. Popes and emperors moved heaven and earth to fix the calendar, and failed. Face it. Our calendar is a horological mutant.

What’s the solution? Adopt a variant of the Mayan calendar. Forget months. Institute 60 six-day weeks for an even 360 days in the year. Each six-day week would have four work days and two rest days. Labor says yes; management is still thinking about it. Which day should be zapped? I vote for Wednesday, a day of midweek blues.

What about the five days, five hours, 48 minutes, 46 seconds remaining in the solar year? Simple. Designate that period “marking time.” Place it after week 60. Declare it a national holiday for elections and electioneering — the only time of year during which candidates for public office are permitted to campaign or make political speeches.

2. Real science. One third of Americans think the faces on Mount Rushmore are a natural formation. Astrology, a billion-dollar flim-flam industry, replaces awe in astronomy. In science classrooms, miracle biology is replacing four billion years of life on Earth. In the bookstore at the Grand Canyon National Park, miracle geology produces the canyon in eight hours instead of eight million years. I’m waiting for the stork theory of sex to surface in medical school. Let’s resolve in 2005 to keep science education secular. Let science explain the cosmos. Let religion provide a sense of place and purpose humans seek in that cosmos.

3. Real energy. Let’s resolve to make America independent of fossil fuels in 10 years; it’s smart business, smart economics and smart politics. Let America lead the future energy economy and its dazzling technologies. It’s high time oil, coal and other fossil fuels went the way of the dinosaur, along with the dirty air, toxic lands, contaminated waters, greenhouse gases and the foreign dependence they generate each day. In 2005, let’s mobilize our nation’s scientists and engineers to the frontier of energy research, much as when we put a man on the moon in the 1960s, and decoded the human genome in the 1990s.

4. The real environment. Proverbs says, “He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind.” Our house is the Earth and we have troubled it. This house is not just the human species, but all plants, animals and natural environments, which religious adherents revere as all Creation. Earth’s ecosystems provide $33 trillion of “free” services annually in scrubbing our air, water and soil and providing us with food, fiber, fuel and pharmaceuticals. As a species, we have dominion over this house; we have inherited the biosphere and the contract to sustain it.

The earthquake and tsunami that struck Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India took a terrible, tragic toll in human life and property. Unfortunately, they were not part of the 25-country tsunami early warning system. In 2005, let’s begin to heed the environmental early warnings of rising temperatures, melting glaciers and other signals. Down the road, if global warming and species extinction continue unheeded and unchecked, the toll will be worldwide and far greater. In 2005, let’s take the long view of stewardship for our world.

America the beautiful is our most bountiful family value, the grassland, desert, tundra, river, lake and ocean that color the planet for every man, woman and child, looking up from Earth or down from space.

Here’s to the life of the of the planet. Let’s celebrate it together in 2005.

— Leonard Krishtalka is director of the Kansas University Natural History Museum & Biodiversity Research Center.