It is worth noting that since getenv('MY_VARIABLE') will return false when the variable given is not set, there is no direct way to distinguish between a variable that is unset and one that is explicitly set to the value bool(false) when using getenv().
This makes it somewhat tricky to have boolean environment variables default to true if unset, which you can work around either by using "falsy" values such as 0 with the strict comparison operators or by using the superglobal arrays and isset().