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Amazonia is generally regarded as a wild region that contains abundant natural resources, such as oil and biodiversity. The hegemonic development and environmental discourses enforce economic, productive and, more recently, conservationist projects that expand aside of the indigenous peoples. Amidst strong development-ecology tensions, the interface between biodiversity and indigenous lifestyles in Amazonia remains largely neglected. Field research on the indigenous peoples of Pastaza, in Western Amazonia, undermines the global perception of wild Amazonia and supports the indigenous context of Amazonian ecosystems and biodiversity. Indigenous communities conserve, use, cultivate, manage and exchange biodiversity as fundamental component of their rural lifestyle. The indigenous agroecology comprises the whole set of knowledge systems, agroecological practices and socio-cultural dynamics that shape indigenous agriculture in the context of biodiversity. The indigenous agroecology provides food security, health care, and ecosystem resilience through a local regime of biodiversity conservation and use. However, global development models neglect and dislocate the indigenous context of biodiversity. In this impasse, the indigenous peoples of Pastaza are advancing grassroots mobilisations to contextualise development in their ecological, epistemic, and cultural domain. Biodiversity and the indigenous agroecology can launch an ethnoecological vision of development.