I'm curious what people feel are the most effective ways to load environmental variables for scripts called from cron. I've heard that the scripts themselves should contain them, but potentially limits the ease of their portability, and I've heard that there can be security risks with just loading environmental variables for an entire cron environment.

Any thoughts or suggestions on this would be enlightening and helpful. Thank you.

There's another option, which mitigates some of the maintenance issues of having variables set in all your scripts, yet doesn't require the environment to be altered for all cron jobs. That is to launch your cron jobs via some wrapper script which sets environment variables.

e.g. Make a script /home/me/cronrun containing:
Be very careful about sourceing your shell init files (e.g. ~/.bashrc) that you don't end up spawning lots of shells, especially if you have a "tricked out" your shell init files. It'll probably be perfectly OK until some smart-arse makes a change and all your cron jobs stop working, or worse, jam up the system...

Once you've made such a script and chmodeed it to be executable, you can modify your cronjobs like this (addition in blue):

Thank you for that excellent suggestion...