Setting environment variable for Rails app?

Greetings! I’m trying to set an environment variable in Rails. Why? I
can’t use RMagick unless I do so. I can do it from the shell, run irb,
and then require ‘RMagick’ works. So far so good. But how can I do
this from my application?

I’m on a shared host so I’ve put in a ticket to have something like
this added to httpd.conf:

SetEnv LD_LIBRARY_PATH /usr/local/lib

That would probably fix it. I’ve tried adding it to my .htaccess with
the other settings but it doesn’t seem to work. Restarted the process
and everything. Even tried adding this to environment.rb but nothing:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/local/lib"

Is there any way to force this library path in my application? Or am I
stuck waiting for my shared hosting company to fix the issue?