Mac OS X keeps its environment in ~/.MacOSX/environment. But if you want to access those variables from the shell, it's a bit cumbersome to parse this file manually. So here is a little shell loop to do that (tested in zsh and bash):
# Iterate over all keys returned by defaults # Get key's name into "$i" # Set environment variable with key name to value obtained via defaults for i in `defaults read $HOME/.MacOSX/environment \ | sed -nE 's/^ ([a-zA-Z0-9]+) = (.+");/\1/p'`; do eval export $i="`defaults read $HOME/.MacOSX/environment $i`" done