OSCAR-winner Mark Rylance and environmental writer George Monbiot will be in Purbeck for a public forum on how the Dorset community can can influence national and global progress.

Topics up for discussion at the event – hosted by community group Planet Purbeck at the Sandy Hill Arts in Corfe Castle – will include thorny issues such as rewilding, tourist taxes and, in a wider context, efforts to solve the convergent economic and ecological crises.

Rylance, who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance in the Steven Spielberg film Bridge of Spies, and Monbiot, a leading critic of mainstream politics and passionate environmentalist, will conduct a Q&A session with each other and take questions from the audience.

The actor, a patron of Planet Purbeck, will also auction a signed photographic portrait of himself as Henry VIII’s scheming chief minister Thomas Cromwell – a prop used in the acclaimed BBC series Wolf Hall.

And he will also help launch a Friends of Planet Purbeck scheme aimed at expanding the group.

READ MORE: Oscar-winner Mark Rylance becomes a patron of Planet Purbeck

“I hope the chat with George will be full of ideas I haven’t imagined and good humour,” he said. “I will depend on the audience for the really smart questions.

“There is a desire to build up a group of people interested in similar things such as nature conservation and climate change so there is a place they can come with concerns – and make a difference with ideas and action.

“I believe in thinking internationally but acting locally. If you change a small or local thing well enough it will affect the rest, which is true in biology and the environments we live in. We can lift the whole system into a better place of harmony and equilibrium.”

Guardian columnist and author Monbiot added: “I’m greatly looking forward to it. We’ll be navigating the great political and ecological crises in which we find ourselves, and hoping to chart a path through.”

The forum, on October 11, is the third in a series of Planet Purbeck Presents events scheduled for the autumn.

It follows a ‘marine ecology evening’, co-hosted by Greenpeace in Swanage on September 19. and a theatrical and musical performance of Stravinsky’s short masterpiece The Soldier’s Tale in Langton Matravers on September 26.

Details of all Planet Purbeck events can be found at www.planetpurbeck.org.

Actor Mark Rylance with the portrait from Wolf Hall that will be auctioned. Picture: Planet Purbeck